Why Golf is Everyone’s Game

Despite its relatively small size, rocky terrain and famously inclement weather, Scotland has given the world two extraordinary gifts—whisky and golf.

Although, like most games, it’s played with a ball, golf isn’t the equivalent of a “combat situation.” You don’t occupy enemy territory and rack up points by scoring. You play primarily against the course, then your opponents. It’s also the only game, besides racing events, where the lowest score wins.

No one recorded how such a singular game first originated. My guess is that a shepherd got bored minding his flock and started hitting round stones, of which Scotland has many, down a rabbit hole with a stick. Finally, he—I assume he, because golf began to interest women at a somewhat later date—found a root or a cudgel roughly the size of a golf club that worked better. If he’d been Irish, he could have used a shillelagh. Then another shepherd came along, and the first one said something like: “Hey Rob, I’ll bet ye I canna get me stone down that hole hitting it less times than you hit yours.” Golf was born.

The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, founded in 1754, gave the game its first formal rules. However golf was apparently a popular sport there as early as 1413, when the University of St. Andrews was founded. It became so popular that King James II banned the game in 1457 by act of the Scottish Parliament because it was interfering with archery practice.

Eventually stone and wooden balls were replaced with gutta-percha (a kind of natural rubber) which in turn paved the way for the high tech ones used today. Cudgels gave way to wooden shafted mashies, niblicks and pitchers, which in turn were replaced by numbered woods and irons constructed of the same materials used in making stealth bombers.

Golf has spread far beyond Scotland, and is arguably the most popular game in the world. Soccer, for all its popularity, isn’t yet an American sport. Baseball is mainly played in the U.S., Japan, and Latin America. Basketball is still quintessentially American, even though more and more players come from abroad. Other than races, only golf, along with tennis and possibly fishing, are truly international sports.

The best players come from anywhere and everywhere. While American players predominated in the recent U.S. Open, golfers from all five continents, as well as Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand, competed. The best woman golfer, Annika Sorenstam, is Swedish, and Tiger Woods is African-American and Thai.

Golf is a game anybody can play, because skill matters more than size. Modern football and rugby players resemble small tanks, and weigh about as much. Basketball players can hitch rides on low flying planes, but golfers, while they do need physical strength, look like everybody else. Some are fat, some are thin; they’re big; they’re small, but above all they’re normal.

Neither size nor, to some extent, age, decides who wins. “Bantam” Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers ever, was 5’9″. He came back from a car crash that almost killed him, to win the 1951 Open. In 1953, at the age of 41, he again won the U.S. Open, as well as the British Open and the Masters. Jack Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters at the age of 46. A Brit named Philip Golding just won his first title, capturing the French Open at the age of 40.

Woods is no monster of the fairway—at 6’2″ and 180 pounds, he’s about the size of the average 27-year-old American male. Because of this everyone who plays the game, and a lot who don’t, can identify with its stars. “Hey I’m the same size as Tiger Woods—why don’t I play like him?” Which of course gives golf its mystique. Give Woods, or any other top pro, only an ancient mashie, a niblick and a croquet mallet and despite all the high tech stuff in the average golfer’s bag he’d probably win by 10 -12 strokes.

Golf, as played in the U.S., has also become increasingly democratized. In Europe it’s still somewhat of an elitist game, but here anyone can rent clubs, take lessons and play the local muni course. Country clubs do tend to remain the preserve of businessmen and a lot of rich retired ones at that. Have you ever wondered what they’d do if the Scots hadn’t invented golf? But you don’t need country clubs to play the game.

In fact you don’t need to play at all. While some may think that golf on TV is the equivalent of watching paint dry or grass grow, many more are fascinated by it—my 96-year-old mother for one.

Why does she watch golf? “It’s a nice game, a good game; the men who play it are gentlemen; and they’re not trying to kill one another,” she said. Maybe a non-combat game appeals to us because it takes our minds off the world’s upheavals. Perhaps it could be popularized in Iraq.

Charles Boyle is the International editor for Insurance Journal.