Sarah N. Cleghorn

The world of dissenting labourers is as dead as the water-mill and the labouring children have become the aspiring caddy-golfers of our time. There is good money in being able to play the game well and Marie Antoinette, surveying the golf world today, might start by asking why, if the poor cannot play the game, they do not grow rich by becoming caddies. What really matters nowadays, in some cosmically symbolic way, is epitomised by all that is golf. Paradise is 18 holes in the neighbourhood. Glamour is the stuff of life and if we play golf we have it. If the grass is greener on the other side of the Arabian Sea, it is only because in California they invest in tees and fairways and greens. If we really want to "develop", we must do the same. That is just contemporary common sense, par for the course.

Ironically, though, we would be left intellectually poorer if we looked only from a Gandhian/Marxist lens at the rather retrograde sociology and politics of golf. The sport itself, looked at dispassionately as a complicated way of repeatedly whacking the same ball with a set of anorexic iron staves, is far from being a dismal art. The history and poetry of the game is wonderfully developed, as are its aesthetics and internal dynamics. The skill needed to play golf as well as Hogan, Snead, Ballesteros, Trevino, Nicklaus and Woods have played it reveal a richness, artistry and surrounding folklore which even cricket would be hard put to rival. Herbert Warren Wind and Henry Longhurst are its Neville Cardus and John Arlott. Their prose has immortalised the fact that the effort the game requires is unconnected with stamina and brute strength, but rather with foresight, accuracy and a nearly superhuman equanimity.

This also makes golf the only game in which a sportsman can play at the highest level for as long a stretch as 35 years. Athletes run well for five or six years, squash and badminton players burn out in less than 10 years, tennis players in a dozen perhaps, cricketers in 20. In contrast, when Jack Nicklaus announced last year that he would probably stop playing the British Open, he had been playing more than 40 years. Golf is the game for both sides of middle age. "Years ago," said Franklin Adams, "we discovered the exact point, the dead centre of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net." He might have added that the exact point of old age is when you are no longer able to walk those final nine holes. This playing longevity, in combination with the phenomenal levels of annual earning even for second-rung players working the circuit, makes golf a more lucrative proposition than any other game. It almost looks like God has conspired with capitalism to make golf an attractive proposition.

By the time this column appears, Tiger Woods will either have won or come close to winning the U.S. Open, which is being played this year in the heart of the Bible belt, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The U.S. Open is golf's equivalent of what used to be played with a wooden racket at Forest Hills and is now played at Flushing Meadows with cloned catgut strung onto reinforced aluminium. To be able to say this with confidence about a golfer, about any golfer - that he will win a Major, or come pretty close to winning it - is discursive deification. Between Jack Nicklaus, about whom it was possible to say this for all of the 1970s and much of the 1980s, and Tiger Woods, about whom it has been possible to say this for the past four years, there has been no golfer of comparable stature. During the interregnum there were four who showed exceptional promise: Lee Trevino, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman and Severiano Ballesteros. Trevino and Ballesteros were great fun to watch because they seemed human even while playing divinely. They sometimes made mistakes and it was reassuring to watch them get out of the woods with salvaging shots.

Trevino had a repertoire of jokes and, when asked "what's your favourite drink?", is said to have reparteed: "The next one." Woods, is more like McEnroe: his first shots are those of a man possessed, he manages incredible accuracy while showing all his emotions, and he follows up each power drive with delicate shots that are inhumanly pinpointed. If Robert Frost had seen him swing he would certainly have said, "Woods is lovely, dark and deep."

We have, by contrast, no golfing equivalents of Prakash Padukone, Pullela Gopichand and Vishwanathan Anand. Vijay Kumar, Ali Sher, Jeev Milkha Singh, Jyoti Randhawa and Arjun Atwal are still local boys who have made good in this part of the world, sometimes from extremely poor personal circumstances. It is very nice for all who follow Indian golf to rejoice in the fact that they have collectively raised the game to a new level in India. Yet they would all readily confess to being pygmies in relation to Tiger Woods. Perhaps, given the discomfiting elitism, the increasing inequalities, and the relatively rotten social context of golf in India, this is because Marx and Gandhi, sitting in heaven, are frowning at our capitulation to California.

RUKUN ADVANI

Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing company in New Delhi.