The news that Turnberry is planning to charge a peak-time green fee of £1,000 per golfer has created a predictable outcry among British golfers.
Given the owner of the famous Scottish links, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. In 2015, Donald Trump told Fortune magazine: “I feel golf should be an aspirational game. People should come to golf, golf shouldn’t come to them. Let golf be elitist. When I say ‘aspire’, that’s a positive word. Let people work hard and aspire someday to be able to play golf. To afford to play it.”
That’s hardly in keeping with the notions under which the game initially flourished in Scotland all those centuries ago, but then Mr Trump is not in keeping with many people’s notions of how an American president should behave.
Still, at least the course at Turnberry is accessible to anyone prepared to stump up the cash. It is almost axiomatic that any course in the US that you’d love to play is going to be strictly private – and in many cases, the reputation of the course is in part established by how hard it is to access./p>
In the Old World, thankfully, a different culture exists around the country’s great clubs. At Sunningdale, arguably the most storied inland golf course in the British Isles, green fees are far from cheap at £350 per round on the Old or New Course, but you wouldn’t need to be looking into the possibility of re-mortgaging your home in order to secure a round. The club has a culture of allowing visitors to enjoy the courses. The members appreciate they are lucky to have what they have and are happy to let others have the pleasure of playing there.
Golf is a game that rejoices in its history; its traditions. But, as with everything, there are times to embrace change. The Open Championship began at Prestwick in 1860 after the death the previous year of Allan Robertson, who had been the first man to break 80 round the Old Course at St Andrews. “They may shut up their shops and toll their bells, for the greatest among them is gone,” lamented one R&A member. With Robertson’s passing, the inaugural Open was an attempt to determine who was now the best golfer in Scotland, which then meant being the best golfer in the world.
The rules of golf evolved and the mores of playing the game became established. Above all, perhaps, at the old clubs in the British Isles where the game was nourished, golf marked out its territory as a place of honesty and integrity. In an essay for The New Yorker in 1968, Herbert Warren Wind put it well. “Eighteen holes cover 130 acres or more of fairway, rough, green and hazard, and since the play of each golfer could not be superintended, it was up to each man to obey the rules. When you and I were playing a match I did not sprint across the fairway to make sure you didn’t ground your club in a bunker, and you did not come pounding into the woods to see that I didn’t improve my lie.”
(Notwithstanding this, one of my favourite golf anecdotes was narrated by the estimable British golf writer, Peter Dobereiner, who was once playing with a minor member of the aristocracy in Italy. “Is it lying well, my lord?” he enquired when the other had just discovered his ball in the rough. “Not yet,” came the response.)
A sense of fair play is a core value of golf. Sadly, these days the same cannot be said of fast play. In this regard, the professionals must take their share of the blame. At the Open Championship last month, we watched some of the best players in the world taking over five hours to play their rounds – and, they remember, hit comparatively few shots and if one of them does go astray they have hundreds of people to help them find their ball. One morning last week my son and I comfortably played 18 holes in two and a half hours, and while he shot in the 70s I was some 20 blows north of that. I fully appreciate there are few nicer places to be than a golf course on a summer’s day but one shouldn’t take all day over it. As used to be asked of one world-class German golfer, ‘why does Langer linger longer?’
There is a lesson to be learned here, too, from those illustrious old golf clubs. Some people might pooh-pooh them for what they perceive as their pomposity, but maintaining a decent pace of play is an integral part of the culture of traditional British golf clubs. Apart from anything else, it makes it far easier to fit in another 18 in the afternoon. Maybe even a further 18 in the evening?
This doesn’t mean one should hare round the course as if in a hurry to get away. What it does mean is being ready to hit when it’s your turn, something that is more easily achieved if everyone in the fourball (it usually is a fourball) does not wait in line behind the first guy (it usually is a guy) to hit, and then the one after him, before going to their own ball. Also, there is no rule of golf that demands that every two-foot putt in a friendly game needs to be given the aim-point treatment.
The renowned American author, John Updike, wrote several pieces about golf. One of his observations was this: “Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somewhere together where non-golfers never go.”
We should go continue to go there in good humour and with integrity and, ideally, do it rather quicker.
Robert Green is a former editor of Golf World and Golf International. Follow him on Twitter @robrtgreen and read more of his writing at http://f-factors.com/
