This is coming from a former hobbyist golfer, so take heed of my words. There are few redeeming qualities with this "sport", and what few there are still show how borderline misanthropic, and disastrously boring the game really is.
Let's begin with just how boring this game really is. There's a meandering process of whacking a ball (of progressively excessive technological advancement) along the length of a sprawling series of yards trying to reach a hole. That can take a long time to accomplish. When you finally reach what is called the green, you replace your club with what is called a putter, and with some force, tap the ball so that it crawls towards the hole. And in it goes, ending that run. That's one of eighteen god damn holes you've finished, and it took you maybe half an hour to do. All that time you had to carry a bag with at least two or three clubs designed to drive that stupid ball into one damn hole. Or you placed your golf bag on a buggy that costs hundreds of dollars to rent for your daily excursion. Excited, yet?
It's even worse to watch the damn sport on television or even as an onlooker at a game itself. Footage of every individual ranking player is shown for each ****ing hole and you may forget just how much time passes for one hole to actually finish. What's worse is that most of the time you see footage from players on different holes altogether, which screws with the pacing of the event. You watch balls ascend to sodomize the innocent air, minding its own business, and then it descends and thuds against the ground. Rinse and repeat, the game continues for hours until finished. And you are left in a daze, as if hypnotized by a master of his trade. Indeed you were hypnotized; the trance the Golf Channel induces in each faithful viewer can last a significant portion of a day.
Golf is an environmentally unfriendly sport as well. Sure, the courses are pretty and well-maintained, but that is at a sizeable cost. First, a huge section of land is reserved for the designs of the course; we're talking hundreds of acres per course, so that's problem enough. Another is the chemical treatment of the greens and fairways through pesticides and insecticides (cue the discussion about the half-life of various distinct pesticides); there's run-off always involved with golf courses and someone, somewhere has to pay for it. Then there's the fact that it's a colossal waste of space.
I'm sort of a fan of George Carlin's material. He did have plenty of boring, meaningless tangents in his delivery, in my opinion anyway, but one of his (many) jokes got me going for sure; golf, and how arrogant & boring it is. Arrogance is the order of the day for the sport indeed. In fact, look at the history at the name of the sport – Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden; does that not scream of arrogance, let alone misogyny to you? To this day it's an arrogant sport. Numerous golf resorts charge an arm & a leg just to play a round with friends, and they are often highly exclusive, usually by income bracket. Shadow Creek has a round fee of $500, the most expensive in the U.S. That's just to walk around, smack a white ball around with a fancy club (which are often even more expensive than green fees), and just to get it in a hole – rinse and repeat until done and probably frustrated to high heaven. And let's go on to how expensive golf clubs are, damn it.
There's a golf club manufacturer based in Japan, who crafts them out of platinum and gold. That sounds luxurious, and it certainly is. But you thought $500 at Shadow Creek (designed by Tom Fazio) was bad; a 14-piece set from Honma, that same Japanese golf-club maker I briefly mentioned, charges approximately $32,000 for those clubs. Then you take a look at how much one single golf club costs to own; the First Lady Special Edition – Diamond. They're very fancy, and made with fine minerals, and obviously they bear a prestigious value to them. Well, just one of those golf clubs cost a whopping $150,000. Gear and apparel for golf need not be mentioned, either.
There's an entire channel dedicated to golf, aptly titled the Golf Channel. As if it weren't bad enough to watch just one entire game of golf in one day, now you have to watch it twenty-four hours a day, with commercials of course, with few non-sporting events to break up the insane monotony of the concept. What makes golf an absurd sport, in my opinion anyway, is how utterly commercial it is. There's nothing but product placement to be found in every instance of professional golfing; the hats the players wear, the shirts and pants they wear, the banners dotting the edges of the rough of every course, onlookers, the paid-for presentations of televised events, and even the commentators have to ensure a paycheck by reminding the viewer ad nauseum that "this event is brought to you by…"
There are too many golf courses to be found in North America alone. They take up far too much space than they, and the game, are worth, and the same lands they sodomize could have been put to better uses. George Carlin's bit on Golf was hilarious for how he suggested that instead of hosting boring golf matches, they could build shacks and even low-cost housing for the homeless to give them a place to go. Especially egregious in places that ostracize the homeless, sometimes even forcing them right out of the cities they often can barely get away from. But that wouldn't be attractive to the average Joe, would it? Only in a truly perfect world would that happen. But then again, if this were a perfect world, golf is amongst the things that wouldn't have come to fruition.
Did I mention that Golf is boring, and really, really, really sucks? I played the game until I was 13 years old, and I was pretty decent at it. I looked forward to it quite often, and if I put time and dedication into it, I could have developed a career out of the sport. Well, something happened that offset all of that – I woke up. Maybe the old timers in their ridiculous getups, Tiger Woods, caddies, and golf resort/course owners will wake up too…eventually.
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