If golf is snooty, uptight, tradition-bound, and reserved for the privileged elite, who’s to blame?
Alex Stevenson has an answer to that question: The British middle class. “Golf is one of the least democratic sports around,” he argues in an essay posted at Yahoo! News. “And it is the English middle class which has ruined it.”
By “ruined it,” Stevenson means that social strivers took a fundamentally egalitarian sport, one created by farmers and laborers, and locked it away behind the doors of high-priced private clubs. Before long, golf became a weapon of class warfare. And today, he contends, “The chief preoccupation of those in power in the nation’s golf clubs is keeping the hoi polloi away from their carefully cultivated greens.”
As anyone who’s ever spent a few hours in an uppity club knows, there’s some truth in what Stevenson has to say. But in nations all over the world, golf is played on courses that welcome the hoi polloi. Are those venues part of the class struggle as well?
