A good walk spoiled

"They call it golf because all the other four letter words were taken."

— Raymond Floyd, golfer

The best thing I can say about Tony Blair is that despite being born in Scotland, he is not a golfer. He's often seen enjoying other games, for instance tennis, but aside from any times his partner in crime George W. Bush might have dragged him along to play a few holes, there is blissfully little golf-related Blair content out there.

On the other hand, the worst thing I can say about Tony Blair is he might as well be a golfer. This is not to say that hitting a ball with a stick is somehow worse than committing war crimes, don't be absurd. Try to think of golf not as a game or a hobby, or even a waste of time (even though it is). Rather, think of it as a uniquely sinister ideological crucible, a cauldron of global power in which all the evil in the world is stirred into a cocktail of oppression and smugness. Golf is an an empire. It must be abolished.

Even on the surface, golf is horrible. It's boring. It's destroying the environment. Billionaires play it. Everyone looks weird. But the true awfulness of this demonic sport goes deeper, because the fact of its existence in the world speaks to our sense of who we are as humans — and it does not speak kindly. Join me, fellow golf abolitionist, and I will attempt to answer the question that you know, deep down, has always haunted you: what the hell does golf want from us?

The sport of kings

"My, lords, ladies, fellow party workers, I am a golfer! [Applause] But I am also a Conservative, and the Conservatives are back in power! What a wonderful word!"

- Rowan Atkinson, Conservative Conference sketch (Not The Nine O' Clock News)

I've been asking myself that question since I was eight years old. There's almost nothing about world politics I still believe as an adult that I once believed as a child. The one exception, my longest held political view, is that golf must be destroyed, and it's all thanks to my muse, Tony Blair.

It was March 1998, less than a year into his first term as Prime Minister, and the United Kingdom was still reeling from the sleazy nightmare of John Major's short-lived Tory administration. Ordinary voters still generally liked Blair back then: this was before Iraq, before ASBOs and PFI, before his ghoulish wife's horrible autobiography delved into her and Tony's sex life.

But one political organisation whose membership some would argue once included at least a handful of normal people, the Countryside Alliance, already loathed the New Labour government, which was just about to ban fox hunting. Anyone from Britain will tell you, the main thing worth knowing about the Countryside Alliance — aside from being pro-golf, by the way! — is that they really hate foxes. And much like golf, this is all about power.

The aristocracy-led Countryside Alliance was formed in 1997 ostensibly as a campaign group defending the interests of UK farmers and rural communities — mad cow disease was in full swing — but the impending fox hunting ban was their real gripe. And so these tweed-wrapped fruitcakes organised the second biggest protest march in modern British history (the biggest was the 2003 anti-war demonstration, also against Blair but from the left) to send their forelock-tugging liegemen through the streets of London in defence of the "sport" of their masters.

Yes, sport. Traditional fox hunting in Britain is an ancient elite bloodsport first, and a pest control measure a very distant second. It is carried out by old money toffs dressed in fancy red outfits that would make even a golfer cringe, who pursue the foxes on horseback while directing their hounds to trap and mutilate said foxes, literally tearing them to shreds. Like most of Britain's aristocratic bonding rituals — soggy biscuit, pig fucking, etc — it is creepy, barbaric, and insane.

And so the bogus "pest control" argument predictably failed to sway the public to the pro-hunting cause. Animal welfare was only half the concern, the other half being that everyone knew exactly which end of Britain's archaic class system would be given a kicking from this ban. The title of "Chief Whip" in many modern democracies originates from the "whipper-in" of the hunt, whose job was to keep the dogs in line. Oscar Wilde called fox hunting "the unspeakable chasing the inedible." The bloodsport is an invocation of authority over beast and man.

I seriously doubt Tony Blair, himself a smirking avatar of business class bloodlust, pushed this legislation out of an earnest love for furry little woodland critters. The ban was a political masterstroke, though, which solidified the cultural politics of the Clintonite/Blairite "third way": popular rights-based social liberalism to ice the cake of financial deregulation. New Labour ended the Tory monopoly on free market fundamentalism, and the fox hunting ban helped carry that project. Pick an easy, unpopular target, annoy your political opponents, and undermine the cultural foundations of their power (Tories pride themselves on being "the natural party of government"). By banning the landed aristocracy's favourite pastime while slashing banking regulations, Blair stole the post-Thatcherite heart of the nouveau-riche financial sector, at the same time giving his erstwhile alliance of centrist and leftie voters a very big (and very old) scalp to enjoy together.

Now there was this one bloke at the Countryside Alliance march whose placard delighted me. I was dragged along by my family, who used to go in for that sort of thing. But for 8 year old me, a disinterested vulpine agnostic whose only issue with foxes was the smell when one of the dogs rolled in their shit, it was just a nice day out in the capital. About half the signs people carried were about fox hunting, and all the rest were about other pressing rural concerns of the time — "EAT MORE BEEF, YER BASTARDS" plus an Aussie flag, that sort of thing.

All, that is, save for one middle aged dude, nay, a prophet, who carried a badly painted sign nailed to an old broomstick: "BAN GOLF!"

Something about my guy's message spoke to the very core of me. Perhaps the shit-eating grin plastered across his face helped, since despite our age gap we were both, in that moment, eight year olds akin. My conversion to his cause was instant and profound. I loved the idea of banning golf as a child because it would annoy people who golf, which felt somehow to include both the marchers and the government. New Labour seemed (ostensibly) unrelated to golf at the time but that didn't matter to me, I was experiencing something primal, like beating a drum for the first time.

And thus was born my oldest political position: golf is wrong. My reasoning for this has evolved over the years, and golf abolition slowly grew from a simple urge into a fully fledged doctrine. As an adult I came to realise that maybe my gammon-faced prophet had a point after all: that in a mystical if not literal sense, as an imperial new-money demon who committed the sins that he did before going for a long swim in JP Morgan's post-invasion good boy pocket money, Tony Blair is basically a golfer.

Chief whips originated in old money's bloodsports. Britain's wars were "won on the rugby fields of Eton" (where the scions of the empire's savage officer class were educated). And nowadays the reigning sport of kings, the pastime of presidents and the fancy of financiers, is golf — the bloodiest sport of them all.

No tigers, no woods

"Life is not fair, so why should I make a course that is fair?"

- Pete Dye, golf course designer

A decent lens through which to view the worldly problems caused by golf is to ask: if we just straight up banned it, who is going to get mad about it? The answers flow readily: Wall Street, the International Golfing Federation, wealthy owners of private courses, almost every President of the United States, grasping middle class try-hards who hate their children, et cetera. Nobody whose tantrums the self respecting golf abolitionist need lose any sleep over.

Yes, we seek the innocent and noble pleasure of upsetting those people. But beyond that, the rising tide of global resistance to golf these days is expressed through several big, urgent, material grievances, among the most pressing of which are environmental.

Golf is terrible for the planet, and the ecological cost of those manicured greens is paid for with poison and drought. Courses around the world have an excessive dependence on mains water, exacerbating issues from the consumer cost of the UK's privatised water system; to actively making Californian wildfires more dangerous by hogging water (even as households have to put up with hosepipe bans); to overburdened agricultural systems across the global south.

Meanwhile the use of pesticides doesn't just pose a health risk to homes near golf courses, but is also killing bees at an alarming rate. Try maintaining food crops on a planet lacking essential pollinators. On that note, try maintaining pollinator populations on a planet already in dire need of reforestation — a catastrophe in which golf has played no small part.

The endless unnatural disaster of the game highlights in turn the next bogey: ownership of the earth itself. Golf has a well-earned reputation for land enclosure, shutting non-members out of vast spaces that in too many cases can't even be traversed by local residents, who instead have to go around them. Even in cities, and sometimes even when the city or government owns the land! (In London, for instance, almost half the golf courses are owned by councils and the Crown Estate). But woe betide the unwary pedestrian who assumes a golf course must be legally traversable parkland.

In a world shaped by centuries of European settler-colonialism, golf's unceasing rash of land enclosure (and all the inequities that spawns) across the map is, ultimately, an exercise in hegemony.

Old boys, clubs

"Golf: a plague invented by the Calvinistic Scots as a punishment for man's sins."

- James Barrett Reston, aka "Scotty"

Even setting aside more tenuous historical claims that, like fox hunting, golf stretches all the way back to ancient Rome, it's no secret that imperialism and Scotland's national sport have gone hand in hand throughout most of its history. Particularly its history in the United Kingdom and United States. Golf truly exploded worldwide in the 19th century, but it was first played in North America at least as far back as the mid 17th century and, for our purpose as abolitionists, we can consider the modern game's genesis to have occurred roughly five hundred years ago, in Scotland.

Like so many things that were okay before a European ruling caste got their grubby hands on it — Christianity, quinoa, BDSM, etc — golf wasn't always elite. We know this because its earliest recorded mentions come in the form of tyrants trying to stop commoners from having fun. In 1457, King James II of Scotland had his parliament ban the playing of "gowf" (and "futball") because the peasantry were wasting time they should've been dedicating to military training, in case they had to fight the English. Clearly this didn't work: through the rest of that century they had to ban it again three more times, rather tellingly on the grounds that it was "unprofitable."

Such sinful quandaries MaGiCaLLy dIsApPeArEd the moment King James IV purchased a set of golfing equipment from a bowmaker in 1502, and the ban was lifted shortly after a peace treaty was agreed between Scotland and England (who would soon take up the game as well). This is probably important, given the fact of the empire those nations would soon begin building as partners.

Prior to that far-reaching calamity of 16th century gentrification, those early golfers living along Scotland's gorgeous east coast made space for their recreation the way peasants always had: simply stepping outdoors and doing whatever. The original game consisted of finding a nice stick somewhere and using it to yeet a pebble over a sand dune, and the first modern 18-hole course wasn't constructed until 1764. An awful lot changed in between, both to the game and to the world.

Its first historically recorded appearance in North America — Albany (NY), 1659 — was also a ban: specifically, forbidding people from playing it in the street. And interestingly, it was half a century after King James lifted the Scottish ban that the Archbishop of St Andrews (where golf is widely agreed to have been invented) 'granted' that city's residents the 'right' to play it on the links just out of town. At that same location a couple hundred years later the Society of St Andrews Golfers — which exists today as the R&A — was founded by a group of, you guessed it, landowners and aristocrats. So the power grab that grew up to become today's institution of golf courses foreshadowed and even fed into the great wave of land enclosures that took place over the following centuries.

As usual, once the English were involved, everything got worse. Queen Elizabeth I died unmarried and childless, and since James VI of Scotland was her heir presumptive thanks to some shared Tudor ancestry, in 1603 the two kingdoms were unified and the king moved his court south to rule from London. His son Henry began to play golf with courtiers and high ranking military men on Blackheath, forming the world's oldest official golf club. The beginnings of European colonialism were well underway, and so the game was seeded among the English populace (the King made a proclamation allowing them to play it but only on Sundays, naturally) just in time for the brave new world of global British oppression.

Confiscated from the peasantry, repackaged for the nobility, and then resold to the soldiery who would export it on those colonial adventures, golf was firmly established as the ideal pastime for elitist toadies desperate to curry favour with the boss. How fitting that the name for a golfer's loyal little helper, 'caddie', comes from 'cadet'. How fitting, too, that the first historically named caddie (a strapping young lad called Dickson) carried clubs in 1681 for the Duke of York, a title held today by another keen golfer: Andrew Albert Christian Edward Mountbatten-Windsor, better known as Prince Andrew.

Once upon a time the Duke enjoyed a public reputation more associated with his decades-long military career (including the Falklands War), but nowadays Prince Andrew is best known for his suspiciously close friendship with billionaire child predator Jeffrey Epstein. Questions had been quietly hovering around Andrew's potential level of involvement with Epstein's elite paedophile ring ever since the mogul's first conviction in 2008.

There was a brief flurry of "will he distance himself?" press coverage in 2011, which was placated by Andrew relinquishing his then-role as a government trade envoy (a tenure during which, incidentally, he was funnelled millions by the same corrupt Kazakhstani ruling brood that slid Tony Blair a ton of consultation money after they murdered a bunch of protesters). But aside from that mildly chastening haircut, for a cozy decade the British media's disgusting convention of monarchist omertà was largely able to keep the lid on Epstein-Andrew whispers still lingering in the country.

Until, that is, the disastrous November 2019 BBC interview. Andrew managed to present himself so goddamned terribly that it became the royal family's biggest PR fuck-up since their odious mishandling of Princess Diana's death. The palace went into damage control and removed the Duke of York from most of his pending government duties, but still went ahead the following February with granting him the honour of ringing the bells at Westminster Abbey to celebrate his birthday. Even as I write this, the press is performing its royal duty and broadcasting such need-to-know reporting as information on the Queen's continued affection for Andrew.

(Here's an unpleasant and bizarre demonstration of the UK media's servile attitude to aristocratic sex offenders: the article where I learned Andrew's handicap — seven, apparently— is a piece of client journalism about his big fancy house that doesn't mention his Epstein connection at all. It was published a month after his car crash interview.)

Beyond a smattering of plucky exceptions, the golf establishment's general response to all this was almost as depressingly predictable as that of the palace: they weren't sufficiently embarrassed not to drag their heels when it came to removing him from noteworthy positions of public life. See, Prince Andrew isn't just a golf enthusiast, he's genuinely very good at it, holding a professional level handicap, and even wielding the prestigious captaincy of the R&A during the 2003–4 season. He's been flown to championships on public money, and has been spotted listing his golfing events in The Times as official engagements. His pet charity (until they wisely kicked him out) was the Golf Foundation, which sponsors young golfers. Last summer reporters asked the general manager of the Royal Burgess Golfing Society (of which the Duke is an honorary member) if their Andrew connection had caused them any trouble lately, to which they replied "not particularly." It took almost half a year before his beloved annual tournament for junior golfers was finally axed. Suffice to say it is not a great look that not a single one of those tepid cleansers took place during the previous years of his dodgy Epstein association being public knowledge.

At the time of writing, the R&A still proudly display his captaincy and committee tenure on their website.

It throws into sharp focus the sheer political scale of Andrew's golfing career that during Donald Trump's last UK trip as President, the British government dispatched the prince to hang out with Trump on the course as the state's "secret weapon" of "golf diplomacy." Trump had previously begged the Queen to let him play on her own personal golf course at Balmoral, but on this rare occasion her snobbery was at least funny for the rest of us because his request was never granted. (Perhaps Andrew had told him about that course when he totally didn't meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago several years earlier). All the same, the deeper truth of power and golf has been laid bare: nothing could be a greater demonstration of the game's unifying sorcery between nouveau riche and aristocracy than not just putting those two monsters on the links together but elevating it to an act of statecraft.

They certainly have a lot in common. But aside from more blatant similarities like being born into wealth, leeching off public money, being secretly broke, noncing etc, the most interesting and pertinent parallel between these two plunderers of Scottish dignity is their hideously overgenerous treatment by the golf establishment even long after the fact. Like Prince Andrew, Trump is only now, years too late, beginning to face the bare minimum of accountability from the powers-that-be of the international golfing community.

Explaining their recent decision to block Donald Trump from hosting future competitions, the PGA of America's CEO, Seth Waugh, claimed: "we find ourselves in a political situation not of our making." Sure, man. Even fox shit doesn't stink this bad.

Golf columnist Eamon Lynch, shortly before Biden's inauguration, urged his readers to grant the former President "no safe harbor in golf", and sensibly reminded them that Trump's toxicity to the game itself had been clear long before those last ugly days of fascist insurrection. Even before winning the Republican candidacy in 2016, Donald Trump's virulent racist chaos was causing old and prestigious tournaments to be moved or scrapped. But the establishment stayed on side, rhetorically chiding his bigotry while still letting him host their tournaments. The R&A (god I'm so sick of their bullshit) didn't rule out using Trump's Turnberry course for championships until this January for crying out loud! As Brian Armen Graham put it, "that it took this long is the real scandal."

No ifs, no putts

"If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf."

- Percy Boomer, golfer

Perhaps the sporting professionals who were dumb and nasty enough to toady up to Trump during his tenure have learned their lesson. And perhaps at last those big institutions really will bring down Bill Clinton's go-to golf supplier.

But so what? The ghastly political wheel of golf's eternal return just keeps turning more blood and soil regardless. The House of Saud's own murderous regime is busy luring the cream of America's (already extremely rich) golf talent to "jet in and out of Saudi Arabia for their annual cash grab with barely a murmur of discontent."

Meanwhile the course-owning Queen continues throwing her grandson under the bus to protect her creepy failson, and by extension the perceived legitimacy of an imperial monarchy dependent on the fantasy of its benevolence. Her majesty now, bizarrely, has defenders among the nihilistic, unhinged American right — not because they endorse monarchy but because of what the royal family actually represents.

Maybe a Scottish problem needs a Scottish solution? Sometimes I wonder at the beautiful notion of seeing (or rather hearing) golf tournaments disrupted by bagpipes. At least the Scots, who for all their sins retain more dignity than the bloody English, have dared to fly colours that don't run. The liberty-loving poetry of Burns sizzled back to life when protesters showed up at Turnberry to give Trump a uniquely Scottish dose of plain English:

Too much has already been lost to the ravenous demon that is golf. Too little time is left for us to save nature, and our souls, by playing nice with monsters. The old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born, but we carry the solution here in our hearts. It's time for us to return the punishment, to take a leaf out of that ye olde Scottish monarchy's book and do to our rulers what they once did to their subjects all those years ago: abolish golf.

Imagine what you would do with that land if it were restored to you, its rightful owners. Imagine reclaiming a golf course, and with it your self respect. You could plant trees and save the bees, rewild the place if you want. Real woods, damn it, with real tigers. (This might keep fox populations under control btw lads, one to consider). What would you do with this space, now that the world is yours to heal?

You could even, whisper it, innocently whack a ball around with a stick. I don't care, just as long as there are tumbles in the rough, foxes on the fairway, and freedom on the green.