When 21-year-old Kim Smith – the tall green-eyed brunette model, actor and brainiac – hit her first hole in one she felt perfectly complete. Her father, a handsome swaggering Texan, had been teaching her the game “since practically the day I could walk”, she says. At high school she played for the Varsity Team, leading them to several notable victories. That hole in one, though, eclipsed all her previous achievements. “I felt right,” she tells me. “I was consummate, brilliant, lost and superb.”

She makes golf sound like mountain climbing, snowboarding, surfing and great sex all rolled into one. Kim, with her all American enthusiasm and Texas twang, perfectly lends golf the frisson all non-golfers imagine it lacks. She is one of a growing number of female celebrities – including Sarah Michelle Geller, Catherine Zeta Jones and Gabrielle Reece – who have taken up the game. It’s enough to make you wonder whether there is something about the sport that attracts the attractive.

Golf, is by reputation and clubhouse culture, a notoriously sexist game. Only last year something happened at the Royal and Ancient golf club that succeeded in outraging all right thinking people. On the day in question the weather turned very nasty, wind, rain and hail tearing through the fairways and rendering play all but impossible. Since women are not allowed into the R&A’s clubhouse, three female golfers were forced to take refuge beneath its parapets. After around half an hour a man rushed out with a large umbrella. The unfortunate women instantly assumed their luck had changed,

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