Golf Politics

2011-11-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

Available in December 2011 from Duke University Press:

Video by Ivan Weiss (c)

Listen to interview about The Passion of Tiger Woods, golf, and anthropology with WUNC's Frank Stasio on The State of Things

Watch webcast about the book from the Duke "Office Hours" program

Read interview about Tiger Woods and the challenges of cyberethnography

2011-10-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

In Praise of Hillandale

It was announced last month that the Hillandale Golf Course might soon be closing.

Losing the course would be a sad thing for my adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina. In a world of gated trophy courses and pricey green fees, Hillandale belongs instead to golf's more democratic tradition. It's an unpretentious public track with very modest fees and a welcoming atmosphere. You'll find all kinds of people out at the course with its busy driving range and practice putting green. Hillandalers include plumbers and police officers, school teachers, traveling salesmen, high-schoolers and hipsters, and Duke students and residents from the nearby Duke Medical Center.

Hillandale was whites-only back in the Jim Crow era. Now, in the best New South spirit, it draws a mixed crowd. The course has become an unofficial center for area black golfers; it's the home track for the North Carolina Central University golf team and a corps of retired African-American regulars. Hillandale is also among the only area courses with a female head teaching pro, Fran James. James and the other pros run free clinics for kids and frequently host charity events, including a recent outing for Duke bone marrow transplant patients and their families. Hillandale is itself an important source of employment in a bad economy. Fifteen full and part-time workers make their living there between the pros, greenskeepers, and others involved in running the course.

Also notable is Hillandale's environmental record. Ellerbee Creek cuts through the course; it had been straightened, probably in the 1950s, into an ugly Army Corps of Engineers-style trench. But in an innovative collaboration with a local environmental group, the Ellerbee Creek Watershed Association, Hillandale superintendent Roy Clark oversaw the remeandering of the creek some five years ago. The results have been spectacular. Trees and native shrubs have grown in along the creek; they add interest and beauty to the course and a bird sanctuary. The work included constructing a wetlands area to catch the oily run-off from I-85 that had previously run straight into Ellerbee Creek. The course itself is the single biggest green space in the central areas of Durham.

The Hillandale closing had been scheduled for October 31. But the Sun Trust bank, which administers the course as a public trust, recently postponed the date. The city of Durham is now apparently negotiating to take over Hillandale.

I hope an agreement will soon be reached and this great Durham spot kept open.

2011-08-25T11:22:00.001-07:00

Forthcoming in January 2012 from Duke University Press

“Orin Starn’s excellent examination of Tiger Woods offers deep insight, original thinking, and valuable new perspectives. This book tells us a lot about Tiger, but even more about ourselves.”—Jaime Diaz, senior writer, Golf Digest

“The next time someone asks me about anthropology’s value to contemporary cultural debates, I’ll just tell them to read Orin Starn’s The Passion of Tiger Woods, a funny, engaging, readable and unapologetically anthropological take on celebrity scandal, popular culture, and American sports. From playful musings on a potentially recessive ‘golf gene’ to critiques of (wildly popular!) speculative genetic theories about black athleticism, Starn takes us on an entertaining ride through the history of a sport, the rise of its current superstar, and the media maelstrom of racial and sexual imagery that followed from a relatively minor car crash in Florida one fateful Thanksgiving night. I’m one of those people who was tired of hearing about Tigergate almost as soon as the story broke, but Starn does a convincing job of showing me why I should have been listening and watching even more closely.”—John L. Jackson Jr., author of Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness

2011-08-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

Golf in Ghana

It’s an iron law of golf economics that you won’t find many courses in poor countries.

You need a healthy middle-class with the money and some spare time for the game to take root as it has in, say, Sweden, Taiwan, or South Korea. The only relatively prosperous African country is South Africa; and it’s the only one with a thriving golf scene, albeit still dominated by the country’s white minority.

I was not much surprised, then, to discover that Ghana has only eight courses, according to the count of a young Ghanaian golf pro, Daniel Appiah, when I visited last month. This West African country is better-known for its legendary ancient civilizations, kente cloth, and Black Stars national soccer team (though they made an inglorious exit from the last World Cup after blowing a penalty kick chance). The capital, Accra, is a sweltering megalopolis that juxtaposes the everyday hardships and vibrant street market culture of so many big African cities.

Global investment marketeers tout Ghana as a success story with its growing GDP. That would come as news to the more than fifty percent of Ghanaians below the poverty line. It was my first trip to Africa, and Ghana is the poorest place I’ve ever been, including years of fieldwork in the hard-scrabble Andes of Peru.There’s little steady work; child malnutrition everywhere; and miserable living conditions in slums without sewage and running water. Every year, legions of Ghanaians set out for Europe, Middle Eastern oil states, the United States, and elsewhere globally in search of a better life; millions more dream of escaping abroad. It’s been argued, only somewhat hyperbolically, that 21^st century Africa has become a vast continental prison.

But, then again, there’s also plenty of joy, beauty and life to be found. At his workshop in Accra’s Osu neighborhood, I met the fashion designer Kofi Ansah. He was concoting a wedding dress for my fiancé, Katya Wesolowski, an anthropologist, capoeira teacher, and director of the Duke in Ghana program. A London-trained friend of the famed genius bad boy designer Alexander McQueen, Ansah has made his career in his native Ghana. His creations blend traditional motifs with avante-garde haute couture. Later, I made the trek with Katya and her students to northern Togo to visit the village where my colleague Charles Piot, perhaps the best-known anthropologist of West Africa today, has worked for more than thirty years. As challenging as life for farmers there, the village is stunningly beautiful -- a 21^st century African Machu Pichu with its stone-walled compounds and terraced fields high up on a green tropical mountain. Here, too, Africa seemed much more than just the proverbial beleaguered continent in need of saving by a would-be benevolent West as the Gates Foundation and so many NGOs and missionary groups would have it. No wonder that observers seem to swerve, almost schizophrenically, between Afroptimism and Afropessimism about Africa's future (and, needless to say, it’s foolish to draw many grand conclusions about the continent anyway given the tremendous heterogeneity of its regions, countries, and cultures).

Most American visitors to Ghana head west to the Cape Coast, and I did too. The area is best known for its infamous slave castles – Elmina and Cape Coast -- where millions of Africans were shipped off in bondage to the Americas. As anthropologist Bayo Holsey describes in her Routes of Remembrance, many African-Americans tourists make the pilgrimage back to the castles nowadays; Barack and Michele Obama visited last year. Paradoxically, however, many Ghanaians don’t much think or care much about the slave trade; it raises for them tricky questions of guilt and complicity insofar as various Ghanaian tribes slave raided themselves to supply the European demand for human chattel. Surviving the present-day realities of poverty and marginalization is the more immediate Ghanaian concern in any event.

I toured the white-washed Cape Coast castle and its horrifying dungeons with a clatch of Senegalese and Nigerian tourists. Some were solemn, but others took calls on their cell phones – one had a Lady Gaga ringer – much to the distress of our Ghanaian guide and an African-American couple on the tour. A friend who’s a historian of Nazi Germany, when I related this, said it's the same way at Auschwitz – cell phones buzzing, teen-agers Facebooking on their I-Phones. No ground is too hallowed or blood-soaked to keep people off their devices in the age of mass tourism. Outside the castle walls, Elminan villagers motored their hand-hewn wood plank boats out to sea for a night of fishing, oblivious to us tourists. They chanted and drummed in the local tribal language, Fante, as they headed out into the deep water.

It was perhaps yet more postmodern tourist grotesque for me to visit the slave castles and then take to the fairways in the same day. But I played a few holes later that afternoon anyway at the Coconut Grove Hotel where I was staying. I was joined by Daniel Appiah, the club pro, and we shared his incomplete set of clubs, which was missing wedge through five iron. Daniel only had one tee as well, and we miraculously managed not break it between us. Daniel had picked up the game at the hotel, and, in fact, taught himself to play almost scratch golf in spite of his slender frame. He was the club pro by default because no one else on the staff knew how to play. His favorite player? Ernie Els, Africa’s most famous golfer.

The Coconut Grove course was little more than a cow pasture, albeit with astonishingly narrow fairways lined by scraggly trees. Daniel’s drive raised a flock of turkey vultures on the first hole; our drives in the second hole had to traverse a pit of crocodiles, there to add a dash of color to the hotel. I was so soaked with sweat that I felt as if I’d taken a shower with my clothes on at the end. Daniel didn’t even seem to have broken a sweat.

He shook my hand, then headed off into the tropical twilight with his bag of six clubs and that single wooden tee.

2010-11-20T15:55:00.000-08:00

The Passion of Tiger Woods

I recently finished a short book about Tiger's troubles, The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal. It's forthcoming from Duke University Press here in Durham. I gave a first public presentation about the book last week at Duke's John Hope Franklin Center. This was a big step for me: the first real event of any kind I've done since going to Sweden for a major double artificial disc surgery in September. Here, complete with my annoying verbal tic of using "sort of" seemingly every sentence, is an excerpt about Tigergate and our strange modern obsession with celebrity scandal.

2009-12-20T13:05:00.000-08:00

Tiger Agonistes

Everyone has an opinion about the incredible fall of Tiger Woods. My favorite piece in these latest annals of Tigerology is by Frank Rich (for my money America's best columnist). Rich takes the gap between the appearance and reality of Tiger as a metaphor for our times -- the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses; the Enron scandal and disastrous Wall Street trickery; and all that other lying and duplicity that has fooled an intellectually lazy and gullible America over recent decades.

At least we can thank Tiger for giving friends and families something to talk about over the holidays. And there's doubtless much more to come in this story that's careened far beyond the worst nightmares of Tiger's handlers. Is a divorce in the works? How long will Tiger remain in seclusion? Can we expect one of those confessional press conferences or tv interviews? Will Tiger be granted that second chance that Americans love to extend to their disgraced yet repentant heroes? And what about Tiger's golf game and his pursuit of the holy grail of most career major victories? There will be plenty more material for the gossip rags, pundits, golf experts, and even anthropologists. I wrote this article published in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Philadephia Inquirer, and several other papers.

* * *

What Kind of Tiger Will Emerge from the Wilderness?

By Orin Starn

As a weekend golfer who is also an anthropologist, I've been watching the recent travails of Tiger Woods and am struck by how well they fit with one of my profession's standby concepts, namely that of the “social drama.”

According to this model, developed by the great Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner, every society undergoes crises that unfold in a culturally ritualized form. Dr. Turner premised four stages to the most common chain of events: breech, crisis, redressive action and reintegration.

Although he based his scheme on traditional African tribes, it applies surprisingly well to our own wired world, including celebrity scandal. In the most recent case, Mr. Woods's alleged affairs breached our culture's conventions. Crisis followed – the superstar's headline-grabbing crash followed by allegations of his involvement with a cocktail waitress and other women, and another late-night ambulance visit to his home. Both the real life of Tiger Woods the man and the vanilla corporate profile of Tiger Woods the brand seemed to crumble almost overnight.

The third stage, an attempt at redressive action, began with a statement on the golfer's website apologizing for “transgressions” and harm to his family.

We now approach the fourth stage in this anthropological drama, namely reintegration and repairing the gap that has opened between Mr. Woods and his fans. It's a sequence we've seen before with other sinning superstars, such as with Alex Rodriguez's steroid use. In that case, the baseball player's public confession and later strong postseason performance seemed to lead many fans to embrace him with real affection for the first time.

But, as Dr. Turner observed in Africa and as anthropologists have noted, social dramas can also end not with a resolution, but with a permanent schism. It's already clear that Mr. Woods will not easily regain his place as one of the planet's most ubiquitous pitchmen and culture heroes. Nowadays, redressive action seems to work only if you're willing to squirm and suffer a bit in front of the cameras. As much as it goes against the control-freak personality of a man who named his yacht “Privacy,” Mr. Woods may have to face the ritual humiliation and penitence of a Barbara Walters interview or a teary press conference if he wants to refurbish his brand.

For now, he occupies the space of what we anthropologists call “liminality” – the wilderness between one status and another. He is no longer the role model whose triumphs on the golf course seemed to be matched by his rectitude and family bliss off it. But while he remains secluded from the prying public eye, neither do we know just what he will become.

During my research for a coming book about golf's role in American society, I followed Mr. Woods around at the U.S. Open tournament several years ago. A crowd of thousands kicked up the dust while trailing this single man, like the devotees of some prophet. Mr. Woods radiated charisma then, but I felt something icy and almost selfish about his capacity to shut out the world in pursuing a lower score. I also was struck by gallery members' nervousness, even fear, of coughing or moving during his swing and being singled out for his withering displeasure. Mr. Woods was like Apollo, a brilliant yet frightening god.

I understood how important his intense focus was to his success, and I do hope he will continue to use it to thrill us with his athletic genius. Simultaneously, though, the anthropologist side of me hopes he will find a way to let us in a bit more. The great golfer would not be the less for stopping sometimes to slap hands with a little boy or to smile now and then to the crowd. As his aura of otherworldliness diminishes, perhaps he can find a way to replace it with something that will better integrate him with the rest of us mortals.

We know he's human now, and I'm rooting for him – not only on the golf course but in life.

2009-07-31T06:26:00.000-07:00

Tom Watson and the Sorrow of Aging

It would have been another one for the ages.

A golfer, almost 60, triumphing at the world’s most hallowed championship.

It looked until the very last as if Tom Watson would pull off the miracle.

Only that simple eight-foot putt stood between him and an amazing victory at the British Open.

Everyone there at Turnberry with its glorious seaside vistas and millions watching worldwide held our collective breath. We groaned with sympathetic disappointment when the great old champion made a dreadful, nervy putt that never had chance.

But there was also something inevitable about this denouement. Aren’t sports really for the young? In his classic Sports: A Philosophic Inquiry, the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss pointed out that it “is young men who are most absorbed in sports and participate most passionately and successfully.” Weiss believed this dominance had to do not only with superior flexibility and strength, but also because sports is the only realm of society where the young have a real chance to excel: “No longer boys, they are not yet full adults able to function as prime factors in society, state, or civilization. The best that most of them can do is excel at sport.”

Only a few men and women, Weiss concluded, “perform exceptionally well in middle age.” And those that do “are so few in number that almost every case awakens our wonder and admiration.”

With wonder and admiration indeed we watched Watson beat back time for 71 holes. You could see the years in the slight limp of his newly replaced hip; and in his creased face splotched at the neck with sun damage (and Watson, like many of us older golfers, played his whole career without a hat in that age before anyone thought of sunscreen and skin cancer). But his compact, confident swing looked just the same as in the glory days of the early 1980s. Then he’d become the world’s best player with his gap-toothed Huck Finn look and relentless competitive spirit.

It should also be noted that Watson even displayed the kind of moral and political fortitude in such short supply in the insular, conservative bubble of professional golf. In 1990, the Kansas City Country Club denied membership to Henry Bloch, the founder of H. and R. Block, because he was a Jew. Watson resigned in protest. The shamed club admitted admitted Bloch several years later.

And one of golf’s great virtues is that it can be played almost to the grave (or for that matter all the way to the end: Bing Crosby, an avid player, died of a heart attack on the 18^th hole at a Spanish club). Many golfers don’t reach their prime until their late 30s, at an age when most NFL and NBA stars have long since retired. The 48-year old wonder Kenny Perry ranks third on the PGA money list this year.

Clearly, in fact, we older golfers find special satisfaction in golf because it allows us one last chance to play. Freud, a chess player but not a golfer, saw play as an original, almost primordial form of pleasure. When we are children, play allows us to create worlds of our own, ones that please us better than the humdrum and sometimes pain of reality itself. As grown-ups, we are supposed to be serious, to work, to stop playing. But, as Freud noted, almost nothing is harder “than to give up a pleasure we have once tasted.”

And golf, as much we may be expected to “work” on our games, is a return to the sandbox, this time with the latest super-sized titanium driver and other fancy golf gear as our treasured toys. Children, Freud noted, will repeat even unpleasurable experiences in play because the child “by being active…gains far more thorough-going control…than when he was merely its passive recipient.” The same goes for golf. Most of us hit more bad shots than good; yet the swing remains ours to control in the make-believe world of the golf course. We fantasize about the hole in one and the personal best score. In that overlap between pleasure, fantasy, and dreaming, we speak of the “shot to go to sleep with": the one really good one we may have hit that day and which we will replay in our heads come bedtime in a grown-up version of counting sheep.

Exact repetition bores adults, by contrast to the toddler who’ll delightedly play peek-aboo over and over again. But the variation of each shot and golf course – as silly a measure of “difference” in the broader picture of golf sameness as it may seem to an outsider – allow for the “novelty” that Freud called the “precondition of enjoyment” for grown-ups. And, just like the play of children, golfers take their game very seriously. The opposite of play – as Freud had it -- is not seriousness, but reality. That goes for both toddlers on the playground and full-grown golfers.

All this helps to explain why golf has such purchase among those of us moving into life’s later years. Like the retirees who serve as starters and “rangers” -- those St. Peters of the golf course -- in exchange for free green fees, old people abound at golf courses. And, it seems to me, death looms large by its very absence – the cheeriness of the joking, the gaudy clothes, and the hyperalive green grass contrasting with mortality’s finality and dreary colorlessness. The very greenness of the course – everything in its biochemically maintained time warp of health and disease-free, almost cryogenic order – stands in juxtaposition to the sagging, imperfect bodies of aging golfers there

We know the Sphinx’s riddle, but it has a golf variant. What walks on two legs in the morning, three in the afternoon, and four in the evening? It’s the golfer. We pass from the youthful carrying of our own bags to pushing clubs in a handcart to, finally, riding in a golf cart when walking the course at all becomes too much. Finally, for the very old, even cart golf becomes too much. That bad heart, the stroke or just plain frailty expels you from golf’s green kingdom for good, watching on TV all that remains. It marks the end of the real activity that makes us fully alive – the entry into what the anthropologist Victor Turner famously called the “liminal” state between life – and death.

In a way, in fact, golf is about staving off death, a last search for pleasure and the impossible grail of completeness in a world where, or so Freud insisted, “the dread of death…dominates us often than we know.” You can see the shadow of death on the golf course everywhere if have eyes to see it. Consider the honorary starter tradition at the Masters. Here legendary past champions hit the ceremonial first drive. Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, and Byron Nelson each peformed these ritual duties before then passing on one by one. In 2006, the great Arnold Palmer agreed to take on the task. For all the ceremony's cheer and bonhomie, it was hard not to think of the contrast between the young, strapping, suburban sex symbol Palmer and the seventy-seven year old – who’d already fought off prostate cancer – arthritically stooping just to tee up the ball. After hitting his drive, Palmer joked about wanting to “play on” (and he'd been upset when, a few years before, he'd been asked to no longer play in the tournament). But the silver-haired champion was not allowed to do this, of course, the honorary starter’s role to hit and get out of the way for Tiger Woods and the other competitors in youth’s fleeting flush. If the springtime tournament is about renewal and the honorary starter the handing down of the sacred bundle of tradition, it is also, the unspoken part, about mortality and loss, the reduction of young champions to creaky old men nearing life's end. Palmer had tears in his eyes later – and they were not of joy -- in describing the moment for his understanding of its significance in his life’s curve.

And this brings me back around to Tom Watson. A late bloomer like Kenny Perry may have his run or, against all odds, a man of as freakish resolve and ability as Watson will himself to a point just a stroke away from winning the British Open. It might have seemed just bad luck that he lost at all. His perfectly struck eight iron on the final hole bounced just a bit too hard, and went over the green (and, if it had not, Watson would have had two easy putts for the Claret Jug). Neil Oxman, a prominent Democratic political consultant who moonlights as Watson’s caddy, told NPR only half-jokingly that his final words would be “I should have had Tom hit a nine iron.”

I don’t think it was a matter of luck or judgment. It’s no coincidence that no one older than 52 – and it was the amazing West Virginian hillbilly Sam Snead – has ever won a PGA tournament; and Julius Boros, whose favorite good golfing advice was “swing easy, hit hard,” is the oldest man ever to win a major championship at 48. It’s almost impossible for a man in his fifties to muster the energy, skill, and confidence to claim victory at these most challenging of tests.

And, in fact, that most classic malady of the aging golfer sank Watson in the end: the yips. They come upon some of us when the body loses the thoughtless confidence of youth and the unsteady hand jabs even the shortest putts anywhere but in the hole. Watson has had the yips for years. Miraculously, he managed to will in short putt after testy short putt for seventy-one holes. He couldn’t do it to the end. He yipped that last putt at Turnberry with Chronos, the Greek God of Time, grabbing him at last. 59, pace Thomas Friedman in his New York Times column about Watson, is not the new 30. It's just 59.

Watson took his loss in stride. He’s all too familiar with pain and death having suffered through the passing of his long-time caddy after a bout with Lou Gehrig’s disease (a story chronicled by John Feinstein in Caddy for Life: The Story of Bruce Edwards). “It just didn’t work out,” as he told one interviewer. It’s power of positive thinking, not to mention ability, that separates the champions from the rest of us. Watson was already looking forward to the next tournament. Sometimes, he said, his disappointments inspire him to even better golf.

Jack Nicklaus, who knows something about winning major championships, called Watson’s second place a “great achievement.”

It was that indeed no matter for the finish.

2008-11-14T14:43:00.000-08:00

OBAMA AND THE TIGER WOODS PARADOX

I had no doubt that Barack Obama would win the presidency.

Consider this: every single American president for the last century has been a golfer (with the lone exception of Jimmy Carter, who only lasted one term anyway). The Obama campaign preferred photo-ops of their man jumping it up with the troops at the more plebeian sport of basketball. But our new president has long played golf when he can, both vacationing in his native Hawaii and in his adopted home state of Illinois. His victory was thus assured by the Golf Theory of the Presidency given that neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain happens to indulge in the the old Scottish game.

Many observers, me included, have noted the uncanny parallels between Obama and Tiger Woods. In this op-ed just published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers, I explore what lessons Tiger's impact in golf may have for our new president.

-----------------------------------------------------

Still A Long Way To The Green

By Orin Starn

It’s not farfetched to argue that Tiger Woods’popularity helped pave the way for Barack Obama’s smashing victory. That legions of golfing white businessmen already idolized Woods may well have made it less of a stretch for them and others to imagine a black man as the country’s president.

For that matter, Woods, much like Obama, presents himself as something of a new “post-racial” figure crossing old color lines by virtue of his mixed ancestry.

But if Woods did indeed make it easier for some to cast their vote for Obama, the superstar golfer’s impact on his own sport holds a cautionary lesson for an Obama presidency -- there’s no necessary correlation between the feel-good symbolism of a pioneering racial breakthrough and actual on-the-ground progress towards a race-blind America.

Many observers predicted that Woods’ example would revolutionize the sociology of golf. They thought many more minority kids would be encouraged to take up the old Scottish pastime, and the sport shed its ugly racial past once and for all. (The PGA tour had a Caucasians-only clause until 1961). The golf establishment promotes its youth golf programs with Kumbaya-style TV ads of smiling inner-city kids, as if the game had indeed put the messy matters of race and money in the rearview mirror.

Actually, golf has gone into racial reverse by many measures. Back in the 1970s, 10 different African-Americans played on the PGA tour; a poor Chicano kid from Dallas, Lee Trevino, became one of the era’s top golfers. Now Woods is the lone black golfer among the 125 card-holding pros, and there are no rising young junior black stars.

Two U.S.-born Latinos now play on the PGA tour, as do an increased international contingent and some exciting new Asian-American stars. Yet the circuit remains overwhelmingly comprised of whites from country club backgrounds. You don’t even see black or Latino caddies anymore, now that carrying the golf bags of a Woods or Phil Mickelson has become a lucrative enterprise.

The reasons for the whitening of professional golf are complex. Except for the touring pros, golfers no longer use caddies in the age of the golf cart. This has shut a traditional backdoor into the game for poor and minority kids. And to train a golf champion takes big money that many black and Latino families do not have.

So does the Tiger Woods paradox really have any relevance for an Obama presidency? I think so. If the visibility of Woods promotes the illusion of race as “fixed” in golf, the very same danger exists with Obama for the country as a whole. His election encourages a fuzzy self-congratulatory feeling that we’ve exorcised the demons of slavery and Jim Crow at last. It can be easy to forget the outsized hardships facing so many black and Latino kids growing up in tough neighborhoods. Poverty, marginalization, and brown skin still very often travel together in America today

Just look at who's doing most of the ditch-digging, grass-cutting, and other dirty work at America's golf courses. It's Latino laborers, barely earning enough to get by.

And we don’t exactly yet have a government that looks like America either. Just as Woods is now the only African-American on the PGA tour, so Obama has been the only one in the U.S. Senate. Now there are none with his resignation last week to focus on the presidency.

The real question is whether an Obama administration will make strides towards addressing the old ghosts of poverty and racial inequality that still haunt 21st century America.

His election was a good opening shot. We still have a long iron over water yet to go.

2008-08-07T19:12:00.001-07:00

Golftopia

I have a new favorite golf destination.

It’s Belfast, the tough old capital city of northern Ireland. You wouldn’t think that golf would have much place in this peculiar little country with its outsized history of blood and turmoil. When I was a teen-ager back in the 1970s, it seemed as if the latest Belfast bombing was always on the grainy black-and-white tv evening news. It was like Biafra and Cambodia, in that category of hellish places that not even those brave backpacker tourists dreamed of visiting.

Everything has changed. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the worst violence between Catholics and Protestants. Although a bit behind the so-called “Celtic Tiger” of neighboring Ireland, a growing economy has brought new prosperity. Now Belfast has the chic outdoor cafes, track-lighted modern art museum, and boutique hotels of any other mid-sized European city. The Troubles, as they are now called, left 3,000 dead and lasting mistrust and hatred, but they're also now part of Belfast mythology. Each side's colorful propaganda murals have become tourist attractions. Tour buses cruise along for a view of the strangely named “Peace Wall.” This monstruous concrete barrier – a model for the more recent Israeli security wall to keep out Palestinians -- separates hardcore Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. There’s even a little museum where you can buy a poster of Bobby Sands, the long-haired young Irish Republic Army (IRA) who smiles down from the street murals like some martyred revolutionary savior in the tradition of Che Guevara and Malcolm X.

And golf has become a booming growth industry. Many of northern Ireland’s early settlers came across the Irish Sea from Scotland, and they had the game in their blood. Even during the worst of the Troubles, the dedicated hacker would still tee it up. One friend, an officer in Royal Ulster Constabulary, recalls using a mirror on a stick to check for bombs under his car before driving off to the club. There’s a scruffy little old public course in downtown right by the church where Ian Paisley presided as the minister. Parishioners would listen to the famous Protestant firebrand rail against the “republican devils,” then head for their Sunday eighteen just across the street.

Now, in peacetime, the game has expanded as never before, a boom propelled by new golf tourism. With dozens of new tracks, boasts one brochure,northern Ireland has become “one big golf course.” Back in the 1970s and 1980s, young British troops flew into Belfast with guns, tear gas and riot gear to try to keep the peace. Now a new generation of British invaders comes over from Birmingham and London for a golfing weekend. And that's not to mention the legions of American, Swedish, and Japanese businessmen pulling those rollaway golf travel bags through the Belfast International Airport in the summer high season.

I had the good fortune just now to play the two crown jewels of northern Irish golf, Royal County Down and Royal Portrush. Both these two venerable tracks lie seaside just a little over an hour’s drive from Belfast;they rank sixth and twelfth in the Golf.com ranking of the world’s best courses.The green fees are pricey, and northern Ireland is no bargain for Americans with the pathetically weak dollar. It felt like a privilege even so to spend a few hours out on these two gorgeous, scary, and just plain sublime outdoor temples to the game.

You head north from Belfast to Royal Portrush. By contrast to the gated exclusivity of seaside American resorts like Kiawah Island and Hilton Head, the town of Portrush is an unpretentious vacation spot of little distinction besides its famous golf course. The clubhouse itself sits right by the highway, and there’s a trailer park out to the right of the first hole. As typical of so much British Isles golf, all this gives Royal Portrush an appealingly less cloistered feel than the sterile American country club cordoned off by its hedges and fences from the workaday world.

I marveled at the sheer beauty of the place for all that. The gloriously blooming gorse made for a palette of its yellow patches against the pale links grass green and the big blue sea stretching out towards the Isle of Skye. And the ruins of the ancient Dunluce Castle rose down the coastline straight from the Lord of the Rings (and old Irish mythology was one of J.R. Tolkien’s inspiration for his great fantasy masterpiece). It’s a muscular seacoast that reminds me of Mendocino on California's north coast,a place to bring your hiking boots and a sweater and leave your beach towel and bathing suit behind.

And then there’s the golf. Portrush is links golf, but very different from the archetype of St. Andrews back in Scotland. There it’s flat, and you can see out to the Firth of Forth and the town from almost anywhere on the course. At Portrush the crumpled, angular dunes make for a much more up and down topography. You feel as if in your own private world down in the twisting fairways; the towering dunes block your view to sea, and sometimes even the next hole over. Then you come up to a tee or green and suddenly the view of the Irish Sea and its massive coastline opens up once more. I can’t think of a more gorgeous hole anywhere in the world than the 5th. Here the fairway climbs up to a green perched on a high sandy bluff with the waves rolling in just down below. The alleway intimacy down in the bottomlands accentuates the vastness of the windy panorama at these high points. Portrush is a course of breaks, dips, and angles that mesmerizes exactly in the breathtaking aggregate of its contrasts.

I got to play Portrush through the American journalist Bruce Selcraig, whose friends Noel Gault and Garth Bresland are long-time members there. Back in the clubhouse, I asked Noel and Garth about northern Ireland. What had it been like to live through the Troubles, I asked with regulation American golf tourist naivete? Noel, a retired bank manager, looked incredulous. "What,” he replied, “do you think it was like to have your friends getting killed?” Garth explained that this northern tip of the island was heavily Protestant and, in general, the more upscale clubs were the same in this country where a feeling of second-class citizenship among Catholics catalyzed the violence. But Portrush, he added, does have Catholic members, and, at least in his view, “ninety percent of the people in northern Ireland don’t care now about sectarian identity.” By contrast to the image of an Ulster in flames, Garth said he always felt safer than in than Florida, where he has a condominium in a golf development. The most obvious change has been the flood of golf tourists up to Portrush. Noel and Garth didn’t like the slow play of the Americans, but they admitted they had nothing to complain about. The take from the $250 dollar green fees means that their own membership costs less than $2,000 a year, a steal for one of the world’s great clubs.

I made my way down to Royal County Down the next day. I was especially interested in this course because it so influenced my favorite American golf course architect Mike Strantz and, before I headed to the first tee, I chatted with club secretary James Laidler about the club’s history. A northern Irish Augusta or Pine Valley in its exclusivity, Royal County Down has only about 120 members; Laidler is only its sixth secretary. This affable Englishman also saw the violence as a thing of the past. The unification of Ireland and northern Ireland, he believed, was inevitable in this new age of the superhighway, the Internet, and the borderless European Union. “It used to be four hours from here to Dublin,” he said.“I made it in an hour and a half the other day.”

As for Royal County Down, Laidler explained that the club keeps faithful to hallowed links golf traditions. That means minimal watering and firm conditions. Interestingly, he added, the long-term ambition was to dig up the gorse, the thorny plant I’d always thought was emblematic of the links golf experience. According to Laidler, gorse is really an invasive weed. Rabbits and sheep kept it in check in an older day. The plant and its vast banks of signature yellow flowers are nonetheless in no imminent danger at Royal County Down. It's hard enough for the ground crew just to keep it in check much less get rid of it.

I was assigned a veteran caddy with a good Irish name, Mick. A construction worker in the winter off-season, Mick had not long ago taken his kids to Disneyworld on the strong pound. He looked more like some Irish movie star in his wrap-around sun-glasses than the stereotypical grizzled Scottish bag toter, but was very much the the master caddy with his yardages and good advice. I wasn't surprised when he told me he’d caddied for the likes of Gary Player and Mark O’Meara (having lost the draw of straws for carrying Tiger Woods’s bag when the two friends played a Royal County Down a few years back).

Mick turned out to be Protestant. His took a very dim view of the IRA, and admitted that divisions still run deep in northern Ireland. As he noted, wearing the Catholic green of the Glasgow Celtics in a Protestant neighborhood – or, conversely, the Protestant Glasgow Rangers Blue in a Catholic one – can still get you beaten up. This white-on-white hatred recalls what Freud famously labeled the “narcissism of minor difference” where two groups of people with very much in common nonetheless make blood enemies of one another. And yet for all this, Mick felt optimistic that the worst of it was over in these new times. His sister was married a Catholic. A few older relatives had objected, he said, and yet most of the family on both sides was fine with this mixed union.

The course was just as marvelous as Royal Portrush, albeit in a different way. If Portrush feels more untamed with its big rugged coastline, then County Down is a golfing version of the impeccable manorial seaside garden. Meticulous greenskeeping means not a stray dandelion or a blade of bent grass out of place.Here the sea is more beach than bluff and an archetypal Irish countryside of stone fences and houses spreads out to one side with the lovely mountains of Mourne rising up in the other. That the courses lies right up against the charming beach town of Newcastle and its rambling red brick Victorian hotel adds to the picturesque old moneyed civility of it all.

Everything about the course was by turns artful, lovely, and perilous.“The kind of golf people play in their most ecstatic dreams,” wrote Bernard Darwin, the nephew of Charles and a leading golf writer of his time. It felt a bit magical indeed to be out there on this gentle summer morning. I was especially taken by the front nine with its views of the silvery sea and mountains; it's easy to see why some cognoscenti call it the world's greatest opening nine. Mike Strantz took his love for the blind tee shot from Royal County Down, and the single most memorable hole is the 9^th where you hit over a big hill down to a twisting fairway backed by the town of Newcastle and the mountains of Mourne. Miss and you end up in the gorse or some impossible bunker. It’s a course where the blow up hole awaits at every turn.

Mick and I had the course almost to ourselves on this day. I only wish that I’d taken more time. Like Portrush, Royal County Down draws thousands of well-heeled golfing pilgrims from abroad, and Mick knew the psychology. Early on, he commented that I seemed to be quite a fast player. This was very flattering, of course, the expert native caddy singling me out from the stereotypical slow-playing American as if I'd been made an honorary Irishman for a day. I started playing even faster to live up to Mick's expectations. We finished the round in just two hours. Mick got off the course with his full fee and an extra couple of hours at the pub or home with his kids. I realized that I’d rushed through one of the world’s best golf courses at the hurry-up speed of quick twilight nine at the local public track. It was like journeying to Paris to visit the Louvre and then sprinting by the Leonardos, the Raphaels, and the Venus de Milo in less than an afternoon.

But I didn’t mind.

Now I have an excuse to return some day.

2007-12-25T17:20:00.000-08:00

Priced Out of Pinehurst

James Tufts decided to build a resort in the scruffy Carolina pine barrens back in 1895.

The soda fountain magnate envisioned Pinehurst as a vacation mecca for the common man. The golf courses and other attractions would serve those “who require the beneficial effect of a winter in the South, but cannot afford the usual high price for accommodations.” Tufts hired the great golf architect Donald Ross for the courses and the even more famous landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead to lay out Pinehurst village.

But the resort is anything but a bargain now a century later.

You’ll need to break open your piggy bank and raid your retirement fund if you want to take a shot at Pinehurst today. I was amazed to learn just how much it costs to play the fabled No. 2 course on a trip last week. The green fee – and this in the cold gray winter low season – is a whopping $375. A caddy costs another $45 – and a $40 or so tip for your man. That’ll be a grand total of $455 for the privilege of teeing off on No. 2, the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild of golf courses at least by price.

The funny little secret is that the course itself is not that good. It just made the Golf.com top ten list of overrated coures in America, and deservedly so. Although I always admire the 1920s Arts and Crafts-era grace to every Donald Ross design, there’s nothing extraordinary about Pinehurst No. 2. The layout is ungainly, curling as it does around the driving range on the back nine with several holes strangely disjointed in their isolation from one another. At Pebble Beach, you get the divine ocean holes for your $400. Here there’s just the loblolly pines and the pale blue Carolina sky. “The trouble with Pinehurst,” as Ben Hogan said, “is that when you try to think of one great hole, you can’t.Nothing jumps to mind.”

It’s the green complexes that the pundits cite as the greatness of Pinehurst No. 2, and the genius of Ross. Yet as golf architecture critic Ron Whitten notes in a fine article, these trademark turtleback surfaces were never part of Ross’s design. It was only decades of accumulated top-dressing – and the bulldozing and sculpting of subsequent redesigns – that elevated the putting surfaces to their present exaggerated contours.

Nor do the green complexes make for especially interesting golf. When I splurged to play No. 2 eight years ago (it cost an already exorbitant $225 back then), it was clear enough that precision with your irons was required. A miss on almost any hole leads the ball to roll straight down off into the collection area that surrounds each green. But all the endless hyperbole about how the course “tests all aspects of your short game” is just that. The shots that one is left with are quite similar and monotonous. Typically, you have to get the ball up from the closely mown collection area back onto the green, whether flipping it up with wedge or, as the less steady among us are advised, running it up with a putter. It's the same shot over and over again -- the tight lie, the 100 foot or so distance. They’re not easy, but they don’t demand any great variety of short game virtuosity.

Precisely, one suspects, because the course itself is not so special, the Pinehurst resort owners play up its history at every opportunity. The clubhouse is stuffed with old photographs of former champions; and the bronze statues of Ross, Tufts, and the more recent legend Payne Stewart also pluck at the mystic chords of heritage and nostalgia. And consider Pinehurst President Donald Padgett II's greeting to visiting golfers printed in the No.2 yardage book: “Shots by Ouimet, Hogan, Nicklaus, Palmer and Stewart still echo down the fairways. Pinehurst has welcomed some of the greatest names in golf.Now, yours is one of them. Thank you for celebrating with us.” Celebrate away, that is, once you’ve plunked down the $375 green fee and, Padgett also hopes, dropped hundreds more spending a night or two at the resort’s also dreadfully overpriced Carolina Hotel. Got heritage? Yup, but don't forget to bring that credit card along. Platinum only, please.

And that heritage is itself predictably selective. You’d never know that a Pinehurst statute once barred from owning property “any person of Jewish or Negro descent and lineage.” Or that black maids were not even allowed to clean the hotel rooms of white guests until 1960.Donald Ross himself kept black caddies in line. When one suggested forming a union, as Bradley Klein recounts in his Discovering Donald Ross, the old Scotsmen whacked him with a five iron. The ugly side of Jim Crow Pinehurst vanishes altogether in all the sepia celebration of resort traditions.

Even today, most African Americans at Pinehurst are maids, waiters, doormen, or caddies, a racial time warp. Jamaican workers do the course maintenance.“It’s the Confederate South,” said one younger black caddie I met this time around. He said he’d only caddied for three blacks in the last year, one a well-known basketball coach.

If you want the flavor of Carolina Sand Hills golf, go stay at the homey Pine Crest Inn. Play Mike Strantz’s stunning Tobacco Road. And if you want to sample Donald Ross, then pick Pine Needles, the classic old track that hosted last year’s U.S Women’s Open, or, a discounted Ross off the beaten track, the Southern Pines Golf Club. It’s really only the wealthy corporate set who can afford the Pinehurst Resort itself any longer.

I don't think James Tufts would be pleased.

2007-06-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

THE GENIUS OF MIKE STRANTZ

Is golf course architecture an art form?

Journalist Steve Sailer makes this case in a smart, provocative recent essay. The designs of Donald Ross, Alastair MacKenzie, and A.W. Tillinghast evince remarkable aesthetics, creativity, and, yes, beauty in their very own different ways. According to Sailer, however, golf’s marriage to the complacent capitalist establishment has led it to be dismissed by the left-leaning, capuccino-sipping, Prada glasses-wearing gatekeepers of the art world establishment. He thinks that golf course architecture should be recognized as one of the great modern mass art forms.

There’s brilliance indeed to the work of one contemporary designer, Mike Strantz. This maverick architect died at fifty not long ago of throat cancer. Two Strantz masterpieces – Tobacco Road and Tot Hill Farm – lie within an hour of one another here in North Carolina. His last design was a makeover of the Monterey Peninsula Golf Club close by Pebble Beach in that great golf mecca of sea spray, cypresses and black rock, and the theatrical drama of northern California’s stunning Pacific Coast.

I can’t say I’m a fan of some of today’s most acclaimed rock star architects. There's something especially vanilla conservative about Tom Fazio’s work, and his corporatized heritage gestures to Ross and the so-called Golden Age of golf architecture in the 1920s. His Pinehurst #4 and University of North Carolinea Finley Golf are competent, but soulless and ultimately uninteresting. This hasn’t kept several billionaires from forking up Fazio’s multimillion dollar fee for designing their trophy courses like Las Vegas’s ultraelite Shadow Creek.

Strantz never commanded the top-tier fees of a Dye or Fazio much less designed anywhere so many courses in his abbreviated career. None of his courses have been venues for major tournaments; some critics find them contrived. His is still more a cult following with golf cognoscenti.

Count me a very big fan. To me, Strantz’s genius lies in understanding the compromised, hard-to-categorize essence of that strange invention we call a golf course. A golf course is part nature – grass, trees, rock, sand, and water under the big blue sky. And yet, needless to say, a course is also artificial, an invention of human hands. Building a track takes bulldozing, moving rocks, cutting down trees, turf grass bioengineered to the latest specifications, and computerized drainage systems as intricate as a missile defense system. No course is ever anything like untouched wilderness no matter how many bird sanctuary and wetland preservations stakes the management plants to endow itself with the chic aura of green correctness. But neither should a good golf course be oblivious to the local landscape and ecology in the cookie-cutter gated community style.

The trick, in other words, is acknowledging and working within the preexisting landscape and yet without trying simply to mimic it. I’m reminded of the famous superscale public art of the Bulgarian artist Christo. When I was a kid in the 1970s in the Bay Area, Christo set up his “Running Fence” in Marin just north of San Francisco. These eighteen foot high panels of white cloth ran some twenty miles before plunging down to the sea. The fence called attention to the lines and texture of the golden rolling hills and yet added something new for the two weeks it stayed up. Christo called his work an “obstructive membrana” changing our view of the land. This exercise in public art was also entertaining, a spectacle and a stunt that rivetted attention by its crazy novelty like Christo’s more recent “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park.

Mike Strantz may be the Christo of golf course architecture. His Tobacco Road course lies in the site of an old quarry with a broken landscape of sand and red clay, eroded hillocks and gullies, and stunted pines and oaks. It’s a hard-working, semi-rural heart of the Carolinas setting bordered by real tobacco fields and an asphalt-manufacturing plant. Instead of bringing in fill dirt to make yet another pasteurized expanse of manicured green, Strantz takes full advantage of the distinctive setting. His design features enormous, visually captivating waste areas of the red clay and sand interspersed with straggly native grasses and dust-loving flowers like goldenrod and black-eyed susans. The eroded gullies and crumbling sand hills make for spectacular carries and blind shots. And Strantz gives his bunkers irregular shapes, and jagged edges. This departure from the convention of the ellipical, smooth-edged trap accentuates the jagged irregularity of the Sand Hills themselves.

One thinks of hardscrabble central Carolina as flat, the monotony of the horizontal under the deadening summer sun. By perching tees and greens on little hills, outcroppings, and gully edges, Strantz calls attention the odd angles of the old quarry landscape, and its ups, downs, and unexpected views and breaks. I wouldn’t have associated anything like beauty with this worn, deforested, and strip-malled heartland of my adopted home state. It’s possible to see it that way through the prism of Strantz’s design.

There’s also a whimsical, almost Alice in Wonderland feel to the project. Hugely elongated, double and triple-tiered greens are a Strantz trademark. Here I’m reminded of an earlier surrealist master, Salvador Dali, and, in particular, of the odd, extended shapes of the clocks in his pop culture iconic “The Persistance of Memory.” There’s a bit of the miniature golf course to some Tobacco Road greens with balls funneling down slopes towards the hole. And, in fact, the course itself sometimes has a hit-the-ball-through-the-clown’s mouth feel with its blind shots, crazy bounces, and whirlygig turns. It’s part of the track's postmodern novelty to be unafraid of being at once brilliant, visionary, serious, and playful all at the same time.

The marketing of Tobacco Road trumpets the layout’s difficulty. “Pine Valley on Steroids,” advertises the web-site. The truth is that the course is not very hard at all; it's a modest 6,554 yards from the back tees with big landing areas and receptive greens despite rugged appearances. This course will never host a pro tournament. I hate to think how low a top player could go here. I like the course all the more for the fact that it’s meant for the average player.

The Tot Hill Farm lies west of the Sand Hills angling up to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a dramatically different setting from the rust red, wispy dry grass, and pale, drought green of Tobacco Road. A palette of deep green forest and grey rock outcrops prevails at Tot Hill Farm in the hilly, Cold Mountain-style terrain bordering the Uwharrie National Forest. Here again Strantz shows his sensitivity to the rivetting specificities of geography and ecology. Another architect might have bulldozed away rock outcroppings to smooth out the the course. Strantz incorporates the stone and its myriad fracture shapes into his design with cliffs and boulder formations extruding everywhere, sometimes in unlikely places like on tee boxes or close upon the greens. He also – and in this case almost literally Christo-like – employs running rock fences especially on the back nine. The structures echo and accentuate stone’s prominence in the landscape and the area's farming history with rock fences having been used as far back as colonial times.

Strantz also highlights water's centrality in these wet, green Appalachian foothills. The irregular, meandering mountain creeks figure centrally in his design as they zig and zag along fairways and curl snake-like around many greens. The setting of other greens back into the forest draw our attention as well to the woods and the surrounding forest with their deer, bear, and black snakes. The effect once more is to heighten our awareness of the land’s varied dimensions, in this case the triad of brook, forest, and gray rock.

Once again, too, Strantz has fun along the way. There are the trademark vast, funhouse greens. Other quirky elements include a tiny tee box on the par-3 12^th hole calling attention to itself – and the boring homogeneity of the usual tee box – by the fact that four players can barely fit on it as it hangs above the creek. Several greens perch precariously on hilltops just as at Tobacco Road; they remind me of those fantastical prints of an imaginary golf course played across waterfalls and gorges to tiny, cliff-hanging greens. Strantz even disrupts the staid formula of four par-3s and four par-5s on an eighteen hole, par 72 course. Instead Tot Hill has five par-3s and five par 5-s, all part of the fun. Don’t we all like par-3s and par-5s more than the middlingness of yet another par-4?

I also liked the democratic pricing and feel of Tot Hill Farm. The green fee is just $40 with cart on a weekday, and the clubhouse a trailer in the best tradition of populist North Carolina golf. It’s great golf not just for those with a fat wallets and a corporate expense account.

Go play Tobacco Road and Tot Hill Farm if you get the chance.

You won’t be disappointed.

(An expanded version of this post can be found in the Los Angeles Times: http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-tr-ncgolf9mar09)

2007-03-28T05:21:00.000-07:00

TIGER AND BARACK

I've been fascinated by the intersecting stories of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama, and what they say about America today. The following essay came out last weekend in the Orlando Sentinel, Des Moines Register, and Raleigh News and Observer:

MULTIRACIAL MIRRORS
By Orin Starn

Separated at birth?

The golf icon, Tiger Woods, and the new political headliner, Barack Obama, are a Castor and Pollux for our times.

Those mythical Trojan twins occupy the night sky as the constellation Gemini. Like them, Tiger and Barack burn bright in the postmodern celebrity galaxy. Their intersecting stories give us a compass for charting America’s changing geography of race, culture and identity. Both men position themselves across old black-white lines in a new hybrid model of multiracialism.

In the past, any African ancestry made you “black” by the bizarre, ineluctable “one drop of blood rule” governing race in America. But Tiger and Barack have mixed origins, the sons of globalization and migration. Tiger’s black American father met his Thai mother in Vietnam-war-era Bangkok. He grew up in sunny southern California like so many Asian-American kids.

Barack is yet another midnight’s child of today’s shrinking planet. His white American mother fell in love with his Kenyan father at a Hawaiian university.

Both men have also experienced racism’s ugliness firsthand. Barack did pro bono housing discrimination work in his lawyering days. Schoolyard bullies once tied Tiger to a tree, then danced around shouting the n-word

Tiger has said he’s proud of being black and calls Charlie Sifford, the pioneering first black PGA pro, his “honorary grandfather.” And yet, in a telling measure of changing times, Tiger calls himself “Cablinasian.” He coined the neologism to convey his white, black, Native American and Asian heritage.

The golf champion and his wife, Elin Nordegren, expect their first child this summer. It will be a tableau right from a Zadie Smith novel: the Thai grandmother, the black father, the Swedish mother and their hybrid child.

The more cautious Obama calls himself a “black man of mixed heritage.” He makes the most of it on the campaign trail. In Kansas, the aspiring president tells heartlanders that he’s one of them. Barack’s white maternal grandparents did indeed come straight out of Wichita. Mixed parentage – or “miscegenation” in that ugly old term – becomes a matter of pride, even a marketable asset.

Far from being exotic exceptions, Tiger and Barack mirror America today. Millions of Americans in this age of great migrations -- from Latin America, Africa and Asia -- have similar mixed origins. What journalist Richard Rodriguez calls America’s “browning” is making us into a more cross-fertilized, diverse nation.

But acknowledging multiracialism remains a tricky proposition in a society that still wants us to pick sides.

Tiger and Barack receive the occasional n-word hate mail. Their desire to maintain multiple allegiances also raises doubts among African Americans. Some black activists, after all, opposed including “multiracial” on the census, fearing it would undermine racial solidarity. One critic goes so far as to dismiss Tiger as a “show mulatto.” And Barack faces questions about whether he’s “truly” African American since his ancestors were not slaves.

Some wariness is in order. We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves prematurely for racial progress. Tiger and Barack had stable, middle-class upbringings. It’s the lack of that security that puts so many millions of poor minority kids at a desperate disadvantage.

And consider the complexion of Barack and Tiger’s professions. Tiger is the lone African American among the 125 golfers on the men’s professional tour (there are none on the women’s circuit). Barack is the only black member of the U.S. Senate.

We have a long iron over water yet to go with race in this society.

But it's understandable enough that Barack and Tiger want to get beyond the tired, old boundaries of American racial politics.

Aren’t we all more than one thing whether we admit it or not?

And new DNA research only confirms that race itself is a fiction in a world of impure, mixed bloodlines from history’s beginnings.

The “one drop of blood” rule was an invention of a society that wanted as many people “black” and thus enslaveable as possible. It’s slavery’s unhappy curse that so many of us still want to believe that black and white are somehow culturally and genetically separate categories, a willed denial of America’s overlapping, multidimensional, intertwined realities past and present.

Does the race-bending of Tiger and Barack augur a change in racial thinking at last? Maybe, and yet it’s never been easy to predict anything as grand as America’s future.

Tiger will be seeking his third major championship in a row at the upcoming Masters Tournament. That would be the better bet.

2007-02-01T12:14:00.000-08:00

GOLF, HYPERGOLF, AND THE DIGITAL AGE

2007 PGA Merchandise Show, Orlando

Zach LaValley with the i-Club

Inside the Convention Center

The PGA Merchandise Show is an enormous golf industry tribal gathering.

More than 45,000 pros, PGA officials, company reps, reporters, and sundry others filled the Orlando Convention Center this past weekend for the event. So big is the Convention Center that it makes an airplane hangar look like a mud hut. A large indoor golf range next to the club exhibits took up only a fraction of the space. The various sections from “Golf Apparel” to the “Golf Travel Pavillion” to the “New Company Discovery Zone” were large enough to be trade shows themselves with dozens of exhibitors. A foldout show floor plan resembled that for a mid-sized city with markings for hundreds of vendors, three exhibition stages, and row upon row of booths featuring everything from new, Titanium driver-adapted tees and robotic range ball picker-uppers to the latest digital swing training systems.

The show measures the sociology and sensibilities of the golf industry. Although the thoughtful Edward Wanambwa of African American Golf Digest reports the numbers have grown some, you still see very few black vendors (and by contrast the low-paying security, janitorial, and shoeshine show jobs are filled mostly by African Americans and Latinos in the familiar American crossroads of race and class). The industry’s look remains overwhelmingly white despite a growing Asian and Asian American presence, including the new AAGolf Magazine.

It’s also mostly a man’s world. With exceptions like appearances by Paula Creamer and the fabulous Nancy Lopez, the bulk of the relatively few women at the show were connected with the apparel industry. By contrast, men make up the vast majority of club manufacturer and technology company reps. It’s another persisting American patterning of society -- women to the “soft” realms of beauty and fashion; men to the “hard” enterprises of technology and science. The golf industry ideal of proper masculinity is itself almost charming in its stubborn retro propriety. I didn't spot a single wisp of facial hair among the thousands of pros and company reps who congregated in Orlando.

A bearded PGA pro is as unthinkable as a clean-shaven imam.

And long hair? Wycliffe Jean forbid. In retrospect, Jack Nicklaus was a golf grooming revolutionary letting his hair grow almost to the collar back in the groovy, psychedelic plaid pants 70s.

As America has at least ostensibly embraced the concept of racial equality and women’s rights over the last few decades, various sectors of society have reacted in their own ways. Golf, needless to say, has never been an avatar of progressive values. For better or worse, it has now embraced a kind of “weak multiculturalism.” No legal barriers block people of color from joining the golf world in this post-Civil Rights era; but neither have the PGA or the game’s establishment rushed to be more inclusive, or done much to get the golf industry to look more like America. There are less than fifty black American PGA pros in a country with more than two million black golfers.

A parallel kind of “soft feminism” prevails. Women are welcome enough in golf and at the show, and yet something of an afterthought. As the charismatic, well-spoken Suzy Whaley pointed out at a show seminar, you find the women’s tees a bumpy mess at too many courses; and, on occasion, male golf pros fall into the same well-intentioned but condescending voice with female students that they would with a kindergartner. The relatively sparse attendance at Whaley’s show presentation, in spite of her celebrity as the first female PGA tour qualifier, itself indexed that golf remains a game more for him than her.

But it’s no news flash that golf leans to the right. Especially for an outsider like me, the show’s single most striking feature was the visibility of new technology. The futurist Alvin Toffler famously asserts that human history has gone forward in three great stages. First came the agricultural revolution, and the accompanying rise of complex, stratified societies like ancient Egypt, imperial China, and the Olmecs, Moche, and other pre-Columbian conquest states of the Americas; then followed the 19^th century industrial revolution with its machines, factories, and massive urbanization. Since the 1980s, the advent of computers and nanotechnology has been linked to a third sea change in global society, the information age. We live now in this new era transformed by the realities of cell phones, the Internet, and the 24/7 global flow of trade and communication.

Golf is rushing headlong into the brave new digital world. Whether handheld GPS yardage systems and infrared putt recording devices and the Tracman Doppler radio ball flight tracker, every aspect of the golf industry is being transformed, in some cases revolutionized. I stopped by the i-Club booth. There the knowledgeable young sales rep Zach LaValley demonstrated the new technology developed by this company founded by three MIT grads. The i-Club is an appropriately miniaturized 2.5” long and screws onto the head of putter or club. The wireless connectivity and special software program provides 3-D swing feedback including clubhead speed, tempo, and angle of attack and direction; it can be used in teaching as well as in club-fitting. You can also connect an i-club to the Microsoft “Links2003” video game for a virtual round as Sergio Garcia, Annika Sorenstam, or just yourself on any number of legendary world courses. It’s not real outdoors golf, of course; but it’s not fake either insofar as you’re swinging the i-club with your flesh-and-blood body. One can only call it “hypergolf.” Here one sees the broader trend of a digitally-enabled world of simulation and computerized images that blurs, even shatters, the old metaphysical boundary between the authentic and the fake, nature and technology, and reality and fantasy.

The technology revolution extends almost everywhere. Consider the golf cart. As company rep Phil Davis for Uplink demonstrated for me, the latest models incorporate every imaginable new high-tech bell-and-whistle. This young company has developed GPS-based hardware and software that can be installed on any golf cart, although it has a special partnership with industry giant ClubCar. There’s multimedia audio; a full-color, in-cart display of the pin position with exact, to-the-pin yardages; a central control system that allows the pro shop to shut or slow down the cart if it goes into prohibited marshy areas or leaves the property. It’s a more sober, golf-style version of what would happen if you took your cart to Pimp My Ride to get it tricked up with all the coolest new computerized gear.

New technology is even transforming the more staid business of tee times. The long, penciled list with names crossed out and fill in on a big sheet of smudged white paper was a fixture of every pro shop in older day. But, as Robert West of Fore Reservations Inc! explained to me, his company markets course management software that has made pencil and paper obsolete. These integrated programs allow the modern-day golf pro to manage financial records, mail marketing, computerized tee times, inventory taking, and bar-coded shop price tags. A pro must increasingly also be something of a computer geek in the new golf world. Less than a third of courses nationwide now allow for self-service Internet reservations. One suspects that virtually all will within the next decade.

Perhaps the loudest technology buzz is around club-fitting. Custom club Einstein and best-selling author Tom Wishon has long pointed out that sticks sold straight from the rack – or just some demo club range experimentation – make a bad fit for the average amateur. But only now is club-fitting beginning to take off. It’s partly a matter of economics. As pro shop sales have stagnated or declined with the flattening numbers of new golfers and tough competition from mall golf superstores, club-fitting offers a way to recover customers, or at the very least stay competitive. The excellent public Hillandale Golf Course close by my house here in Durham built its own fitting shack just last year.

That golfers hear about the latest specialized club-fitting on the Golf Channel and the Internet has also encouraged amateurs to want the service themselves. Once the golf pro was like the doctor – an almost God-like specialist whose expertise you trusted for lack of real access to information of your own. Nowadays just as patients do research and sometimes diagnose their own symptoms at medical advice chat rooms and web-sites, so increasing numbers of golfers come to the pro shop knowing – or at least thinking they know – a great deal about the club performance and fitting. It’s the age of educated, finicky consumer.

Technology is also key to the equation. You can do some fitting with cheap, pre-digital tools like a lie board and simply observing ball flight on the driving range. But the advent of far more sophisticated technologies – including the i-Club – has revolutionized club-fitting by providing a whole new level of data about spin rate, launch angle, and other variables that no one had even dreamed of measuring a couple of decades ago. The smart, personable PGA Learning Center Technology and Operations manager, Gene Powell, gave an overview of these technologies to a packed room of pros. The latest fitting tools include everything from laptop-friendly launch monitors at about $3,000 and indoor simulators in the tens of thousands of dollars like AboutGolf and the P3ProSwing to the even more pricey TaylorMade MATT 3-D Fitting System with multiple cameras tracking both clubhead and ball. A show of hands suggests that only a comparatively small percentage of club pros do anything like such high-tech fitting in their shops. The necessary investment is also daunting. It does seems as if the demand for club-fitting will continue to expand, at least among what remains the large numbers of serious American golfers.

I wonder about club-fitting. It’s not so new in a way: the latest in a longer hobbyist, get-under-the-hood-and-tinker-around brand of American masculinity. Golfers have always loved gadgets and experimenting with one’s equipment is part of the game’s pleasure. Less convincing are the claims that club-fitting will keep more golfers from dropping the game in frustration. It’s hard to believe that a few strokes here or there will make a real difference. And, in fact, the average American golfer is so bad – the mean for men is about 94 – that equipment doesn't matter much one way or the other. One has to question especially the “need” for the down-to-the last millimeter nano-fitting provided by expensive new machines. After all, a golfer can get clubs with about the right shaft length and stiffness as well as clubface angle with the low-tech fitting tools of a tape measure, lie board and hitting some range balls. My guess is that anything more than this has relatively diminishing, marginal returns in saved strokes for all but the elite level golfer. Does Joe Sixpack need to be fitted with a $60,000 Taylor MATT System? I doubt it.

There’s a larger question of priorities in the whole golf technology revolution. Why are we spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing new digitalized golf training systems when more than half the globe’s population lives in poverty? How can one justify buying a two thousand dollar set of the latest Srixon clubs when that’s more than a PGA show security guard with a family of four earns in a month? What does our obsession with having the latest, most expensive toys say about our values and vision for ourselves and our society? The PGA Merchandise Show is something of a temple to guiltless extravagance and consumer capitalism gone wild in a world of haves and have nots.

But, of course, these are the ravings of a left-leaning, politically correct professor who happens to like golf. That bearded 19^th century prophet, Karl Marx, failed to recognize capitalism’s flexible resilience, not to mention the atrocities that would be committed after his death in socialism’s name. But Marx foresaw that capitalism would bring constant technological revolution -- the holy profaned, the shattering of the old in the rush to the new. As much as he detested capitalism’s savage inequities, Marx admired the entrepreneurial energy of the business classes, the "most revolutionary" figures in world history for their tireless-profit seeking energy and initiative. The great social theorist further understood that capitalism would shrink the world itself in "battering down China's Great Wall” and traditional societies everywhere to join the world into a single interconnected system, careening headlong towards the future. The old iconoclast wouldn’t be surprised that the most capitalist of sports, golf, is growing rapidly in the nation of Confucius, Mao, and the gleaming Shanghai skyscrapers.

There will be no stopping the golf technology revolution anytime soon.

2006-12-30T01:17:00.000-08:00

GOLF REVOLUTION: A PHOTO ESSAY

One of the world's fast-growing golf areas is Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Nine courses cluster in the Belek area with its Greek ruins, topsy-turvy resort hotel expansion, and the gorgeous backdrop of the crystal blue sea, arid desert, and the snow-capped Taurus mountains. This has always been an area of abrupt changes with its coexisting and clashing cultures -- the Greeks, the Romans, the early Christian byzantines, the Muslim Ottomans, and the modernizing nationalist Turkey of today. But the new golf tourist boom may be the biggest revolution yet with hotels, roads, and golf courses transforming the area's ecology and society. Now you can visit the breathtaking ancient ruins of the Temple of Apollo or, just down the coast, the new Temple of Faldo, the famous British champion's multimillion dollar Cornelia Golf Course winding its lush green way through the sea pines. As it always does, golf links into social and political controversies here. Turkey's Mediterranean global golf tourism revolution has both its unconditional business boosters and vigorous activist opponents.

Golf Gateway, Kadriye

A personable young British pro, Ry an Parfett, runs an instructional center in Kadriye with the latest computer simulation equipment. Expatriate golf enthusiasts Michael and Loy de la Pena have formed the Kadriye Belek Golf Society.

Letoonia Golf Resort, Belek

A decade ago, this part of Turkey's Mediterranean coast was mostly village farmland. Now it has wall-to-wall resort hotels like Letoonia. These Turkish riviera resort enclaves cater mostly to northern European tourists; they offer all-inclusive packages as a cheaper alternative than Spain and Italy to sun-seeking vacationers. The resorts themselves are fenced off from the rest of Turkey with cable tv, elaborate tropical-style swimming pools, and English and European-language speaking staff. Many visitors never leave the grounds during their Turkish stay.

Ad for golf villas, Belek

Retirees, mostly northern European snowbirds fleeing the winter cold, have been moving to the Turkish riviera. Recent changes to Turkish law make it legal now for foreigners to buy property.

Ali Şahin, Golf Director, Cornelia Faldo Golf Course

That most tourists come from Britain, Germany, and Sweden means that golf investors on the Turkish riviera have sought out European golf stars to "brand" their courses. Faldo's Cornelia course, Turkey's best, opened this year. A Colin Montgomerie "signature" course will be completed nearby in 2007.

Construction for a new Belek course

The unchecked pace of golf course and resort expansion has raised concerns. There are environmental questions about golf's appropiateness in this arid area with limited water and delicate Mediterranean ecology. No real zoning controls have limited the massive resort hotel development. Although construction and resort workers make Turkish minimum wage with basic benefits, a huge gap also exists between the working-class, mostly Muslim local workers and and the well-heeled vacationing Europeans who have made Turkey's Mediterranean into such a popular destination. That ugly barbed wire fences with guard box entries surround area golf courses heightens the controlled enclave feeling of the new tourist economy.

Sorgun Forest

This last surviving patch of seaside old growth forest has become a controversial flashpoint. When plans were announced to build a golf course in the forest, locals mobilized a vigorous, hard-fought campaign to stop the project. Their coalition included restaurant and cafe owners in the nearby town of Side, expatriate environmentalists, and both Turkish and international organizations. The Side activists forced cancellation of the proposed course thus saving this lovely forest long a local favorite for birdwatchers, horseback riders, Sunday picnikers.

Zeynep and Mehmet Gülcü

This Side couple helped to spearhead the successful campaign to save the Sorgun forest from golf course development. They run the popular Mehmet's Bar with its lovely Mediterranean view in the small tourist town of Side. Another local activist, Harun Friese, runs the wonderful Apollonik Cafe right on Side's harbor next to the Temple of Apollo.

Silence Beach Hotel, Side

Environmentalists could not block this cookie-cutter resort hotel at the Sorgun forest's edge. In the foreground is the last small public beach in this area that has seen the privatization of most coastline for tourist resorts.

Temple of Apollo, Side

2006-11-27T01:54:00.000-08:00

"Golf" Ice Cream, Turkey

Bob Hope entertaining sailors
off Vietnam

Klassis Golf Club, Turkey

GOLF AND GLOBALIZATION

What does golf tell us about globalization?

The game has been something of an American export in the last decades. This began in the Cold War when golf was converted into a strong symbol of the supposed superiority of American capitalism and democracy. If the Communist Russians lived in a dreary black-and-white limbo of cheap vodka, bad borscht and gray Stalinist high rises, we capitalists in the United States cavorted in a shiny Technicolor wonderland of Florida and Arizona golf vacations with blue skies, sparkling white sand, cute electric golf carts, white belts and blue and green polyester plaid pants, and tropical cocktails with little paper umbrellas at the 19^th hole. Or so the image-making went.

So many American presidents being golfers has punctuated the connection between the game and the ideology of global American destiny and power. In his goodwill tours entertaining sailors off the coast of Vietnam, comedian Bob Hope hit golf balls from an aircraft carrier deck, the game pushed strangely forward at a bloody frontier of American empire. Along with planting the Stars and Stripes and reading from Genesis, astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin hit a golf shot on the moon. That memorable moment linked the iconography of nationalism and Christianity with the wacky, boys-will-be-boys American boy fun of hitting a six-iron in zero gravity.

And Tiger Woods, of course, is a child of the Cold War and America’s global entanglements. His Green Beret father Earl never would have met his Thai mother Tida if he hadn’t been sent to fight Communism in Vietnam. The young couple nicknamed their child “Tiger” after a Vietnamese buddy of Earl’s who died in a Hanoi prison camp.

Lately, there’s been increasing talk about golf’s globalization. The PGA would certainly like to have us believe that the sport is taking the world by storm – with the accompanying fortune in yen, yuan, and Euros to be made from “worldwiding” its product. One golf world, linked by the miracle of television and creating vast new markets for balls, clubs, cable channels, licensing rights, and the rest. It’s a dream being pursued by Tim Finchem and vigorous corporate golf interests from course architects to equipment makers and resort companies.

But like globalization itself, the realities of golf’s spread are strange, uneven, and not always according to plan. I’m teaching this fall in Turkey. It’s a country of almost one hundred million people with a big, expanding economy and famously strategic location at Europe and Asia’s crossroads. You’d think that golf would be taking off here. The Turkish Golf Federation has energetically promoted the game, including school outreach that provided the young core of Turkey’s recent European Club championship-winning team.

And the requisite originary nationalist myth is even in place. According to this story, modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal, once visited the country’s first golf course, the Istanbul Golf Club, and was served coffee and cognac there by the course manager’s son. The great man supposedly instructed the boy “to study and learn golf for the benefit of Turkey.” Mustafa Kemal died in 1938, but the cult of personality to Ataturk (“The Father of the Turks”), as he became known, must be the largest to any single world leader, dead or alive; it outstrips the lionization of Fidel Castro in Cuba or Kim Jong Il in North Korea, more like the nationalist necrophilia of Lenin’s Tomb or the older monumentalization of Egyptian Pharoahs and Roman Emperors. Ataturk’s picture is literally everywhere in Turkey. His real or imagined endorsement of golf provides necessary official certification in this country that takes its nationalism and great nationalist hero with absolute unironic seriousness.

But Turkey still has only about three thousand golfers. And only about ten courses. Ambitious plans to expand that number to a hundred have run into opposition. Recently, an environmentalist coalition called the Sorgun Platform forced the cancellation of a planned course that would have required cutting down old-growth forest along Turkey’s Mediterranean Coast. They weren’t swayed by the Turkish Minister of Tourism’s insistence that the planned course would actually protect forest by preventing forest fires. In that case, why not cut down all Turkey’s trees, the Sorgun activists sarcastically suggested?

Here golf is also invisible on that ubiquitous postmodern Delphic oracle, television. The NBA has done wonders in forcing its way onto Turkish screens. Several channels carry both this season’s contests and grainy old vintage match-ups. Many Turks recognize LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and other NBA stars. Tiger Woods? He’s conspicuous by his invisibility on television and other Turkish media. Tiger might be an obscure bench-warmer for the Sacramento Kings for all that Turks know or care about him.

One of the most popular Turkish ice cream brands is called “Golf.” But the name appears to be just an empty marker of the modern, the cosmopolitan, and the Western – like the knock-off t-shirts you see here with stray nonsensical English words like “Force,” “Foxy” or “Wavelength.” I suspect many locals buying popsicles don’t know, or care, what “Golf” means.

Why hasn’t golf taken hold here? Economics is one reason. Unlike soccer, basketball, or baseball, golf is not played by poor people anywhere in the world. The cost – green fees and equipment, even in their cheapest versions – prevents it. And thus the pattern to golf globalization; the sport has spread in countries with robust, developed economies of the northern hemisphere. That includes Asian nations like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as well as European ones like Spain, Sweden, Germany, and England together, of course, with the United States. You must have big, relatively affluent middle class for golf to take hold.

Turkey’s middle-class is growing, and yet it’s still a poor country relative to global capitalism’s success stories. And other obstacles exist – a lack of space for courses in vastly overcrowded Istanbul; the absence of a charismatic Turkish player to spark interest; the relative segregation of gender roles that tends to discourage female sports participation. As in, say, Brazil or Peru, golf in Turkey is an elite enclave sport played on fenced in courses designed to keep out the poor and the lower classes. Here the rich and the visiting foreign businessmen live in their own partitioned society of fancy sedans and SUVs, credit cards and jet travel, and the luxury of being waited on by others The world is not flat contrary to what any simple celebration of globalization would have us believe. And golf exemplifies division, exclusion and the ugly contrasts between the haves and have nots so much a part of globalization’s advance.

I visited the Klassis Country Club outside Istanbul a few weeks ago. It’s a quite beautiful, hilly course designed partly by Tony Jacklin; it looked especially striking with the frost and gold and brown leaves that reminded me of the Italy’s Appenines in the fall. But a round here and the required cart cost the equivalent of well over one hundred dollars, a week’s salary for the average Turk. There was only a group of Japanese businessmen out golfing on this cold November day; a few Bulgarians come down as the border is close and Bulgaria has no good course; and Swedes make up the largest percentage of the club’s foreign golf tourists (and golf’s rise in Sweden has been remarkable to the point that some 900,000 people there, a tenth of the population, play the game). These visitors and some wealthy Turks comprise the Klassis clientele. The course is surrounded by a barbed wire fence to keep out local villagers who graze their sheep nearby.

Maybe golf will eventually break through in Turkey. But for now the action is elsewhere – and perhaps most intriguingly in China. Both Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods have made recent golf-promoting visits there with Tiger playing in the Shanghai Open. The image of golf as linked to globalization from above, the excesses of savage capitalism, and the decadent West has been an obstacle to expansion in the world’s most populous country. Peking University just cancelled plans to build a practice putting green in response to complaints that a rich man’s sport has no place in a country with so much poverty.

But, as China’s professional classes grow, it seems inevitable that golf will as well, and golf and capitalist expansion going hand-in-hand as they always have.

A day after the news from Peking University, another newspaper reported that Xiamen University just made golf a required class for economics and computer software majors.

Playing the game, a professor there said, would “improve their job prospects.”

2006-09-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

(Masters, 2006)

TIGER, THE MASTERS, AND RACE FATIGUE

Now, thankfully, that the Ryder Cup is over, it’s time for the silly season with its giant purses and meaningless titles. Can you spell “Franklin Templeton Shootout?” Hard-core golf fans are already in early Masters countdown. Martha Burke, for all the vilification, did brave work in trying to force a measure of self-reflection and change upon the corporate dons of Augusta. What a dangerously radical, un-American idea she advocated…insisting that women be allowed as club members!

A tradition unlike any other indeed. That tradition once included Jim Crow, and barring all African-Americans but caddies, waiters, and maids. Then-chairman Hootie Johnson and his Augusta politburo manageed to maintain the anachronistıc men-only status quo, at least for now. The club had a big assist from CBS (which essentially ignored the questions Burke raised) and the majority of tour players (none spoke out for women's right to join, and a number appeared to support the male-only policy). Larger principles of equity aside, who'd want to belong to any all-male organization anyway? I went to all-male Haverford College for my first year in college just before it turned co-ed. It was awful.

As has been said a million times, Augusta is a lovely course; and there’s much to admire about the Masters. But at some point, one hopes the club will be forced to address its exclusionary gender policy. You’d think that Bill Gates and the other would-be enlightened corporate oligarchy membership would be embarrassed to belong as it stands. It would also be nice to see Augusta’s Brahmins lose some of their smugness and sense of self-congratulation. As anyone who has read Curt Sampson’s fine The Masters knows, the story of Augusta mirrors the ugliness, prejudice, and discrimination of Jim Crow America (and the subsequent offıcially-sanctioned,The Making of the Masters by David Owen made some useful corrections, and yet too often bordered on apologia for the club founders).

And it would be wrong to imagine that racial hierarchy and politics belong only to the by-gone Masters past. An almost apartheid-feel still prevails in some respects. The well-heeled paying fans -- like Augusta members themselves -- are overwhelmingly white. Those doing the toilet-cleaning, garbage pick-up, minimum wage rent-a-cop gate security are mostly poor and African-American. In their numbered yellow overalls and hats, the trash-pickers have a bit the look of convict highway chain gang work crews of an older South, mostly young black men doing society's dirty work.

At a practice round this spring, I used the bathroom. A middle-aged African American attendant was stationed there to mop the floor and clean up the stray paper towels dropped by white patrons. "No Tipping," a sign posted by the club authorities read. It was in the tradition of founder Clifford Roberts' famous suspicion and penny-pinching with workers (Sampson reports that Roberts required concession workers to cut holes in their overalls to prevent them from filching spare change). Although a complex character who left part of his money to Planned Parenthood, Roberts was a man of his time about race. He sent n- jokes to his friend President Eisenhower and believed mixed marriages posed a major danger to society. When fending off mounting complaints about the Masters never having had an African American competitor, Roberts retorted that aThai player had been invited the year before. "That boy," he said, "was as black as the ace of spades."

Of course, the calculus of race is not simple or uniform nowadays. You'll see some wealthy black corporate fans and the faces of a few brown golfers (Vijay Singh, Michael Campbell, and, of course, Tiger Woods). And discrimination or any brand of outright racism are out of fashion in these ostensibly more tolerant times, presumably even among Augusta fans and members. The look of the Masters nonethless remains powerful testimony to the uncanny capacity of hierarchies of race and money (and gender) to shape society no matter how much we'd like to be rid of them.

In short, the Masters "tradition" intertwines prejudice, power, and exclusion with golf drama and beauty. Ever year, the complexity of that past and present are is wiped away in the muzaky CBS theme music; the fuzzy close-ups of azaleas and dogwoods; and the charmingly grainy black-and-white footage of Palmer and other storied champions. A cornerstone of Masters marketing is nostalgia – history with the pain taken out, as the great S.F. Chronicle columnist Herb Caen once put it.

Early this year, I wrote an op-ed about Tiger, the Masters, and the vanishing African American professional golfer that appeared in the Detroit Free-Press, Raleigh News and Observer, The State, and Toronto Daily Mail. It’s below in slightly modified form. I received a number of angry letters and e-mails. Any probing of the politics of race and history at the Masters -- and anything less than the usual hagiography -- seems to trigger an angry defensiveness. Very visible are the emotions of the culture wars, and, in particular, a familiar right-wing, white male aggrievement about affirmative action, feminist politics, environmentalism, opposition to the war in Iraq, and all the rest of what those of Limbaughesque sensibilities imagine to be the wildly satanic, Western Civilization-destroying agendas of the politically correct.

“People like you keep racism alive and well,” wrote one suburban Detroit reader. Another from South Carolina sent a silly puff piece about Bobby Jones – a fascinating, brave, and, like of all of us, imperfect man -- with the single sentence in bold block letters : “NOW THIS PIECE SHOWS PROPER REVERENCE FOR THE MASTERS.” Reverence? Hmm…

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GOLF’S CONTINUING COLOR CONTRAST

By Orin Starn

Golf has long had an image problem.

Many people, after all, consider it a dopey, snobby, boring game for chubby white men in plaid pants. Even golfers sometimes talk down the sport. “Where else could a guy with an IQ like mine make this much money?,” the well-known touring professional Hubert Green once said.

Tiger Woods was supposed to transform golf, especially its whites-only reputation. When this charismatic black prodigy rocketed to stardom a decade ago, there was optimistic talk about the game opening to African Americans and other minorities. It only heightened the story’s drama that Tiger’s breakthrough win came in the 1997 Masters Tournament at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club with its black waiters, caddies, and shoeshine “boys” and exclusive membership of rich white barons of industry.

Then just 21, Tiger knew about prejudice and racial stereotyping from family experience. His father, Earl, the first black baseball player at Kansas State, was forced to stay in substandard Jim Crow hotels away from his teammates. Tiger’s own kindergarten classmates once tied him to a tree and danced around chanting the n-word.

“You’re my hero,” Oprah Winfrey gushed over this young black man taking a white sport by storm.

It’s almost spring now, Masters time again. But a decade after Tiger’s first triumph at Augusta, it has become apparent that the idea of Tiger as his sport’s racial savior was vastly oversold. The truth, Tiger or not, is that the numbers of blacks and other minorities playing professional golf has instead been declining in recent years.

Golf was the last major sport to integrate in the first place. Only a long, bruising campaign led by legendary boxing champion Joe Louis, a golf nut, rolled back the professional tour’s “Caucasians-only” clause in 1961, more than a decade after Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier.

The first black professionals suffered every indignity. Charles Sifford, the first African American to win a PGA event, found human feces in the cup at the Phoenix Open; he received telephoned death threats at another tournament. The Masters didn’t invite its first black golfer until 1975. As writer Curt Sampson documents, the idea of a good time for Augusta National members before World War II was watching blindfolded local black teen-agers beat each other bloody in a boxing ring “battle royal,” a few dollars going to the last one standing.

But a cohort of black professional golfers persevered, and there were more than ten black PGA regulars in the 1970s. Hispanic professionals also made their mark, among them Lee Trevino, the smart, garrulous self-described “Super Mex” who became one of the top players of his time. By contrast to the more privileged background of most professionals then and now, Trevino grew up poor in a south Texas shack.

“I was twenty-one years old,” Trevino liked to joke, “before I knew Manual Labor wasn’t a Mexican.”

But consider this: Tiger is today the lone African American among the 125 players on the PGA tour. And there are just two Hispanics, the relatively obscure Robert Gamez and Pat Perez, out on the circuit competing for the more than $250 million in prize money.

A single black golfer, Tim O’Neal, plays the minor league Nationwide tour. The great Althea Gibson and other black women were on the women’s LPGA circuit several decades ago. Now there is not a single African American tour member in spite of the influx of fine Asian and Asian American players, a lesser force in men’s golf.

Even black caddies have almost vanished altogether. As the job became lucrative with mushrooming tournament purses, whites moved in to carry the bags. Tiger’s New Zealand-born caddy, Steve Williams, likely earned about one million dollars last year, a minor celebrity in his own right.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, no one wants to talk about the resegregation of professional golf. The convenient assumption appears to be that Tiger’s stardom has fixed everything and, as a result, that any mention now of “race,” or, Ben Hogan forbid, “racism” would be party pooper political correctness.

Back in 1996, a first Nike commercial introduced Tiger in a hiply grainy video montage. “There are still courses that I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin,” Tiger said in the ad. Nike wanted to market its newest superstar spokesman as a brave racial pioneer in the white country club world.

Since then, Tiger has morphed into a bland, unthreatening corporate pitchman in the Michael Jordan mold. “Republicans by tennis shoes too,” as his Airness explained his refusal to support a campaign to unseat Jesse Helms, the old race-baiting North Carolina senator.

Tiger won’t offend anybody by declaring that his new $1,700 Tiger Woods “Limited Edition” TAG Heuer is “the only watch that I can wear on my wrist without adversely affecting my golf swing.”

Of course, it shouldn’t be up to Tiger to shoulder the burden of raising uncomfortable questions about golf’s failure to integrate. Why shouldn’t white professionals like Phil Mickelson, Fred Couples, or Davis Love III say something? No one seems to want to admit that the PGA tour is not so far from looking like a whites-only club all over again.

More deeply, the situation in golf measures the dilemma of race relations in America today. At least in the abstract, most Americans want to get along, and to be rid of the silly, strange yet powerful folk belief that skin color says something essential about the person inside. Even the PGA tour now promotes its “First Tee” program for poor kids with spots featuring adorable black, Hispanic, Asian American, and white boys and girls in a Kumbaya-like image of itself as the embodiment of corporate rainbow coalition values.

And yet, few of us want nowadays to confront the hard, complex questions about why America is still such a segregated, stratified society. The idealism of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement has receded into the grainy, almost Jurassic past of black-and-white news footage. A part-fatalistic, part-cynical “race fatigue” instead prevails as if it were pointless even to talk about the divides of color and class in these new times. The film Crash, this year’s Academy Award winner, captures an America where the power of race and racial mistrust is matched only by a jaded lack of any real hope about the possibility of doing anything about it.

Many whites think enough has been done already with legalized discrimination a thing of the past. They are more worried about shopping and schools, taxes and terrorism.

And many blacks and other minorities don’t want to be tokens or social crusaders. Tiger himself has never much liked talking publicly about anything besides his swing, scores, and chances in the latest tournament (and for that matter describes himself as “Cablinasian” as opposed to “black” – part-white, part-black, part-Indian, and part-Asian by way of his Thai mother).

We try to dodge race, but it won’t go away.

If Tiger triumphs again at the Masters, he’ll don the victor’s traditional green jacket to applause from Augusta’s millionaire members, tournament ticketholders, and fellow competitors and their caddies.

He’ll be one of the only brown faces in a sea of white.

2006-09-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

(Weed Golf Club, 2005)

IS GOLF BAD FOR NATURE?

Golf's environmental iımpact has been much debated. Is it a good thing that golf courses now cover an area of the United States more than twice the size of Rhode Island? Opponents -- including groups like the Global Anti-Golf Movement -- underline the dangers. They note the use of insectides and herbicides; the gas and other in-puts for upkeep; the loss of open space; the displacement of older existing communities like African-American ones along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina.

Golf boosters counter that courses benefit nature. They point to the water filtering and atmospheric cooling benefits of turf grass in the age of global warmıng; the role of golf courses as bird and wildlife sanctuaries; and the fact that land used for golf courses might otherwise be used for more environmentally-unfriendly development, like strip malls and housing developments. Although it has plenty of critics, the new concept of "reconciliation ecology" premises that environmentalists must work within the realities of development and change even as they try to protect what we have left of more unspoiled nature. Cooperation between local environmentalists, government, and golf course owners to restore wetlands would be an example of such work.

A good recent case of golf-style "reconciliation ecology" is the collaboration of the Ellerbee Creek Watershed Association and the North Carolina Department of Transportation with the Hillandale Golf Club (a public course just down the street from where I live). This project freed the small Ellerbee Creek from an ugly drainage ditch; this restored its meander, and allowed for the planting of swamp grass and wildflowers, while creating a bird friendly wetland holding pond. The course looks far better, and the creek is healthy again. The wetlands also serve as a natural filter of oily run-off from nearby Interstate 85. Everyone has benefited in this particular case.

But, of course, there are no siımple answers to many questions around golf's complex environmental impact. In the essay below published originally in a somewhat different version in the Los Angeles Times (July 19, 2005), I reflect on some of the larger issues involved in connection with my own very favorite golf courses in the world -- the Weed Golf Club in northern Calıfornia:

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SETTING A COURSE FOR A SHASTA SERENGETI

By Orin Starn

What's the single most beautiful place in California? One thinks of Yosemite's dazzling granite grandeur, like the set for some great cosmic opera. Then there's Big Sur with its kaleidoscope of sea spray, black rock and enchanted green forest. This vast and varied state abounds in spectacular natural beauty, even though we seem determined to pave it over as fast as we can for the next mall, subdivision and freeway.

My personal favorite place lies in California's far north near the town of Weed. It's a lovely high-country spot boasting tall stands of sweet-smelling fir and ponderosa pine, a sparkling brook and, best of all, a breathtaking view of perhaps the West's most majestic mountain, the snow-capped volcano of Mt. Shasta.

This Shangri-La of the Siskiyous is not a park or wilderness area. As unlikely as it may sound, it's a little golf course tucked just off Interstate 5. Golf, I know, conjures the image of rich white men in tacky plaid pants, and environmentalists like to bash golf courses for contributing to gated community sprawl, not to mention the tons of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used to manufacture that velvety green carpet look.

The Weed Golf Club, however, doesn't fit the stereotypes. Anyone can play this public track. It costs just $12 for a full round. You'll pay more than that for a souvenir key chain at the ritzy, blue-ribbon courses in Monterey and Palm Springs that cater to corporate higher-ups and rich golf nuts from Japan and around the world.

The town of Weed itself is no blue blood enclave. This was a company lumber town until the International Paper Co. closed down some 30 years ago. Local boosters have tried to reinvent Weed as a tourist destination ever since the big mill's closing. "I'm high on Weed … California," say the T-shirts for sale at the gas station convenience stores.

Weed will never be a Californian St. Moritz. It has a gritty, working-class feel with the same sad, half-dead old business district as in so many American small towns in the age of Wal-Mart and the other big-box retailers.

You'll see the locals, young and old, at the course. They include firefighters, schoolteachers, retired loggers and cashiers from the McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King along the highway in their free hours. The Weed Golf Club exemplifies the world of the municipal, or "muni" course, a far cry from the proverbial exclusive country club. It's golf democracy in action at these modestly priced, sometimes scruffy tracks nationwide where you'll find people of every age, ethnicity, occupation and skill or lack of it.

But what, really, does golf have to do with the outdoors? We see courses everywhere. Put together, they cover an area of the United States twice the size of Rhode Island. Are golf courses just more uncontrolled development and conspicuous consumption — imitation nature cooked up with chemicals? Or admirable, oxygen-generating green zones — forested parks by another name? Some courses nowadays boast belonging to bird sanctuary and wetlands conservation programs.

The Weed Golf Club looks like Teletubbieland, my young daughter says. Perfect, she means. It's a panorama from the palette of Heidi in Technicolor with the alpine meadow green of the fairways, purple lupine and golden poppies along the shining brook, and picture postcard vistas to Mt. Shasta and the snowy Siskiyou peaks.

I like to play alone in the soft evening twilight. The course can feel at that hour like some mountain wildlife park, a Shasta Serengeti. You'll see deer, quail and rabbits with a glimpse now and then of a weasel or fox slipping fast away into the brush. Once while searching for my ball in the tall, dry grass behind one green, I almost stepped on a big, ropy rattlesnake.

A bobcat was spotted several times last winter, reports Dixie Nehring, the friendly, no-nonsense woman who collects green fees, runs the grill and sells balls and hats at the little clubhouse.

I don't mean to suggest that playing golf at Weed or anywhere else is somehow a "natural" or "unspoiled" outdoors experience. Unlike more upscale private clubs, true enough, the Weed course has no glitzy fake waterfalls, high-tech turf grass or even sand traps. But the two maintenance men work hard mowing, watering and spraying the occasional dose of nitrogen fertilizer and weed-killer. A golf course is neither city nor wilderness. It's nature under tight control by human hands, a hybrid at once artificial and natural.

Golf, I think, reveals a certain ambivalence about the outdoors. Those of us who play want to get out in the fresh air away from the cramped office and the factory floor. But, very often, we don't want to venture too far from a cold beer, hot shower and life's other creature comforts. Golf lets you get away without really leaving civilization in the first place.

Those more rugged seekers among us, of course, want a pristine wilderness experience. In a way, however, the very idea of being away from it all may be an illusion at this point in human history.

I backpack sometimes in the Marble Mountains Wilderness area, 100 miles west of Mt. Shasta toward the Pacific Coast. As lovely as the Marble Mountains are, they are by no means "untouched." They are crisscrossed by hiking trails, the wispy trails of 727 passenger jets in the wide blue sky overhead, and cattle trampling the meadows and spreading giardiasis so you can't drink the water.

Nature is a matter of degree in our shrinking world. A golf course and a wilderness area mark points along a continuum of relative remoteness in these new times where no place is truly wild anymore.

Don't get me wrong. That we've done so much violence to nature makes protecting what we have left of it all the more urgent. We need more protected national forest and not shopping malls, strip mines or, for that matter, golf courses. And if you belong to that big band of people who find golf boring, stupid or worse, fair enough. It's true that the game has very often been linked to snobbery, exclusion and some very bad fashion decisions.

If you do happen to be one of America's more than 20 million golfers, then the Weed Golf Club remains a great anonymous treasure. Stop by this poor man's Pebble Beach on your way up to Seattle or Portland. If you don't have clubs, Dixie can rent you a Cold War vintage set for $5. A package of tees will cost an extra 50 cents.

"No Better Way to Spend a Day," proclaims a sign by the Weed Ladies' Golf Assn. at the sixth hole.

I couldn't agree more.

2006-09-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

RYDER CUP BLUES

I’ve always hated the Ryder Cup. Golf is not a team sport, and instead about the individual pleasure and challenge of doing one’s best. Although fun to play with friends, it’s just as well played alone. As a high schooler back in the 1970s, I remember an enormous delight at playing Berkeley’s Tilden Park course in the last golden light. You felt as if you had the big green forested expanse – and the very world itself--- all to yourself in a gorgeous, magical solitude. It was like being in a somewhat more open, California-lit version of Tolkien’s Lothlorien, or at least until the cold Bay Area fog came streaming over the hill in its enveloping grayness.

The Ryder Cup turns golf into low order theater of patriotic flag-waving and team sport nationalism. All the grandiose, media-driven hyperbole would make you think it mattered to our planet's future whether the Americans or Europeans brought home the cup.

Recall the 1993 Ryder Cup at Brookline. The United States was down to the Europeans on the eve of the final day of play. So Ben Crenshaw called in an old friend to deliver an inspirational pep talk: then-Texas governor George W. Bush. Bush talked to Tiger Woods and the others about the Alamo (an event, by the way, that doesn't look so noble when see from Mexico’s angle insofar as it was part of the seizure by the United States of what had one been Mexican land before the Mexican-American War of 1848). One can only imagine the soupy, testosterone-driven, win-one-for-the-Gipper, corporate-inspirational-speaker atmosphere and cliches from Bush at the closed-door meeting.

Think of it: the Ryder Cup and.... the Alamo. It’s as if there were some connection between a battle where hundreds died and contrived, television-driven golf match with the Americans garbed in those astonishingly tacky red-white-and-blue shirts designed by Julie Crenshaw, Ben’s wife. And yet everyone seemed to buy into this absurd macho cryptonationalist bravado, among them the beery fans yelling insults at the Europeans and chanting “Go USA” urging their team forward. When Justin Leonard sank his long winning putt, the U.S. team and wives made their infamous mad rush across the green, delirious with joy. You’d have thought that cancer had been cured or peace in the Middle East achieved.

The very strange idea that winning a golf tournament – or any sports championship – somehow possesses some greater, cosmic significance has become widespread these days. How, remind me, will our country be made better should our Ryder Cup team triumph? Will poverty lessen? War and torture end? The sky rain freedom and justice? This is another golf tournament, and golf remains, after all, just a game no matter that some of us find it good exercise and a mesmerizing treat to play.

But what about “pride”? That's a word heard a lot around the Ryder Cup. And what an empty, debased five-letter word it has so often become; it tends more than anything these days to be a meaningless, depoliticizing substitute for any kind of critical thinking – a buzzword in the era of now-president George W. Bush for uninformed rallying around the flag and the cause of America First no matter how ignorant and awful the things done in our country’s name.

Needless to say, it's wise to beware when people begin waving flags and talking about patriotism anywhere in the world. For all its more relatively benign forms, nationalism is more often than not a kind of anesthesia and alibi – anesthesia, in discouraging independent thought; alibi, in an excuse for horror committed in the name of the nation. Is it wrong to torture prisoners or hold them in secret detention centers without trial? To oppose measures against global-warming? Or to beef up corporate welfare and slash programs for the poor? No, let’s pledge allegiance to the flag, revel in our self-annointed rightehousness, and dismiss those who raise questions as weak and un-American. It's been a winning formula for George W. Bush, at least until recently

The hype around the Ryder Cup might be excused as in the grand tradition of sports excess and clichés. After all, sports announcers and the networks have always had to persuade us that whatever game they happened to be broadcasting was of momentous import. Otherwise, we might not tune in, or maybe, horrors, go out and play ourselves instead of sitting on the couch staring at the boob tube. My favorite announcers managed an epic solemnity leavened with the joke and smart ironic aside as if in winking awareness that the game is just a game after all. Lon Simmons, the Hall of Fame announcer of the S.F. Giants, was a great master of this.

The problem with the Ryder Cup is that the flag-waving and the rest is not innocent or devoid of its own creepy political import. As terrific a game as it is, golf has the poorest record of equality, opportunity, and inclusion of any major American sport. It wasn’t until 1961 – a full fourteen years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier – that the P.G.A. tour drop its “Caucasians-only” clause. And that only happened under heavy pressure from activists both black and white including former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis as well as Robinson himself (Louis called then-PGA commissioner Horton Smith an “American Hitler” in the New York Times).

To be sure, much has changed and it would be a simplistic political correctness to label golf today as a “racist” enterprise. But the sport today is fraught with an array of complex tensions and cleavages around race, gender and sexuality, the environment, and the gap between rich and poor. A recent article of mine in the South Atlantic Quarterly about Pinehurst explores some of these questions in more detail. For reasons I have also written about elsewhere, the PGA tour has become less as opposed to more integrated over time. Tiger Woods is the only African-American golfer on either the PGA or LPGA tour – and he himself describes himself as “Cablinasian”: part-white, part-black, part-Native American, and par-Asian. Like sports itself, golf mirrors society in its conflicts, passions, and divisions. It’s only sports announcers, the corporate PGA hierarchy, and the players themselves that would have us believe that there are not an array of fraught, interesting social issues surrounding golf. They avoid any exploration or, usually, even mention of these topics as if it they were some deadly new strain of the flu. Their loud silence measures the corporatized sports culture of the Michael Jordan “Republican-Buy-Tennis-Shoes-Too” era where stating controversial views is assumed to be commercial suicide.

I recall the 2004 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. The matter of race and money had been raised in the New York Times and by groups like the Cedar Grove Institute and UNC Center for Civil Rights in connection with the tournament, and especially the state of poor African American neighborhoods in the shadow of wealthy Pinehurst. The only mention in the coverage itself was an aw-shucks feature from Jimmy Roberts about a legendary old black Pinehurst caddy, Willie McCrae . You’d never have known from the story that blacks and Jews were banned from buying property in Pinehurst until the 1960s; that the Ku Klux Klan still operated in the area as late as the 1980s; or that the Pinehurst resort still looks like an old plantation many nights with its black maids and shoeshine boys and well-heeled white guests.

Bob Costas gave Roberts a small opening once the story had aired. “Did [Jim Crow] ever affect him,” he asked. “No, it never came up,” Roberts replied. And so was shut down any commentary about race, golf and discrimination, and the social history of Pinehurst for the duration of the dozens of hours of tournament coverage.

Journalist Bruce Selcraig commendably broke the virtual taboo about golf and politics in an article posted just before this Belfry Ryder Cup. He focused on the Bush-loving, America-first, evangelical Christian Republican politics so dominant in American professional golf and very much reflected in the Ryder Cup team. A recent Sports Illustrated survey gave a rare peek at the general political sensibilities of U.S. pro players. Eighty-eight percent of those surveyed supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq; ninety-one percent backed the controversial nomination of conservative justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. A piece in the same magazine two years before suggested that the David Duval and Billy Andrade were the only Democrats among the 125 tour players.

A wealth of other anecdotal evidence suggests that most other PGA tour players endorse the regulation conservative Republican package: anti-gay marriage, pro-death penalty, pro-corporate welfare, and on down the line. Fred Couples has said he never voted in the Clinton years. Several Republican Ryder Cup members threatened to boycott a 1993 White House visit in protest of new taxes on the rich. “I don’t know many liberals,” tour player John Cook once told journalist Selcraig. CBS announcer Jim Nantz is a Bush friend -- and a mainstay of Masters broadcasts that have studiously shut out any real exploration of the charged questions about race, gender, and the tournament's history.

U.S. team captain Tom Lehman may well be the nice man that many have made him out to be. And being dumb or even reactionary in your politics doesn’t make you a bad person. Yet Lehman -- and at least he is up front about it – has not hidden his very conservative politics. At the Texas Open some years back, Lehman described Clinton as “ a draft-dodging, baby killer.” In a recent book called The Way of the Eagle, Lehman says “God has definitely used golf in a great way over the last several years.” The sport, he adds, has become a “huge platform for golfers.” Lehman did not hesitate to use that platform at the Ryder Cup, at least in small ways. One photograph shows him with a black rubber bracelet stamped “W.W.J.D.” I can't say I'm religious, but I doubt that Jesus would be effectively authorizing torture of prisoners, or other policies of the president that PGA player so embrace in their combination of know-nothing patriotism and Republicans-Mean-Tax-Cuts-For-The-Rich pocketbook politics.

True enough, Lehman's places him in the company of a long line of athlete-activists who've sought to use their celebrity to larger ends. One thinks of a courageous, inspring, boundary-breaking lineage that includes Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Evonne Goolagong, John Carlos, Tom Waddell, Tommie Smith, Arthur Ashe, Cathy Freeman, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova. Lehman and other visible evangelical Christian Republican once and former athletes are in this same tradition of outspoken sports stars -- except that they are on the wrong side of history, social compassion, and anything like a workable vision for a better world. They stand for the struggle of, well, the wealthy, the intolerant, the white, the privileged, and the mainstream to ensure that no real inroads are made towards just and inclusive society.

Whatever happened to the figure of the leftist athlete (and here's to you, Carlos Delgado, a solitary sports progressive)? The only left-leaning celebrities you find nowadays are Hollywood or rock stars. It's not suprising in a way that sports would tend to generate conservatism. Sports, at least in their commonest 21st century American form, celebrate values of competition and individual achievement, numbers and number-crunching, and spoils-to-the winners that mesh with the 21st century capitalist status quo.

“I was 21 before I knew Manual Labor wasn’t a Mexican,” Lee Trevino once wonderfully quipped. But few players come from working-class backgrounds in these post-Tiger days of the mass-produced, swing-engineered, golf-from-the-cradle young professionals.

And, in fact, one reason for the politics of PGA tour players is surely the sheltered, country club backgrounds of so many of them. Nor, I suspect, are The Communist Manifesto and or many readings about feminism and global poverty on the reading list at the Ledbetter Academy high school. It would perhaps be wrong in any event to expect golfers to be deep thinkers given the regimented, all-consuming training demands of the game. The next Thoreau, de Beauvoir, or Fanon is not likely to be an American pro golfer.

It did strike me that there was a bit less enthusiasm than normal in the American media for the standardl patriotic story lines in this Ryder Cup. The ever-clear evidence of the lies, mismanagement, and cruelty in Bush's war on terror have made for a somewhat more chastened America, or at least so one would like to imagine. The story line of Darren Clarke returning after his wife's death from cancer -- and his solidarity with Tiger in the community of the recently bereaved -- was genuine and moving; and it was also very convenient. It allowed the center of gravity of the coverage to shift away some from the usual and yet now somewhat inconvenient nationalist story lines to play up the themes of sympathy and identification with Clarke and the Europeans. The mainstream media coverage turned down the bass line of golf patriotism a bit and adjusted up the knob of universal, internationalist human drama.

I have couch potato tendencies, I'll admit. And I watch PGA tournaments now and then, especially the majors, in spite of the taunts of non-golfing family and friends who believe watching golf on tv is the lowest, least understandable, and most boring of human pastimes. Aside from the politics, I like watching people so skilled at what they do, and, like everyone else, Tiger's charismatic genius. But I still just can’t stomach the Ryder Cup, and its all-too-successful attempt to hitch up golf to the bandwagon of cheesy team sport nationalism.

I’d love myself to see announcers and golf commentators at least now and then talk more about the fascinating, deeper social questions around golf. How many times can you say, “It looks like it’s a hole right” or “He’s got pitching wedge”? There’d still be plenty of time to talk about strategy and the game and it would make the sport more interesting to explore as opposed to suppress tough debates around them.

It won’t happen anytime soon.