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| In an ideal world... |
When I die and go to hell, I will find myself sitting at a table in a club house surrounded by golfers. For eternity I will have to overhear their detailed conversations about the 18 holes they have just played. “Did you see that shot I made up the slope with my six iron approaching the green at the 14th?” Every time I plead with Satan to be stretched out on a rack and have molten lead poured down my throat for a few million years, he’ll just cackle and turn away. The devil knows that the golf punishment is sicker than any twisted nightmare that Dante could have envisioned.
The US Open starts today just up the road from us, and that means more traffic and many more bona fide wankers in the bars of Bethesda. This has prompted me to analyse what it is about golf that I so detest, and the answer I came up with is simple: golf is the tidy sport for tidy people. That final putt on the pristine, flat green is like the player combing that final preppy hair into place before the Country Club Annual Golf Awards Dinner. On the green itself, each perfectly manicured blade of grass boasts as much individuality as the golfers themselves. And there’s not a scantling of noise allowed, because a golfer is deeply concentrating. Not defusing a bomb, or re-connecting the arteries of a transplanted heart. No, you have to be really, really quiet because they are trying to nudge a small ball into a
