Golf | Sport | Politics

Booze, Boos and a Broken Spirit

Did the Ryder Cup sum up everything that is wrong with America?

Point taken! (Wiki Comms)

I used to play golf with my dad when I was in my teens. Neither of us were very good, but we enjoyed the games we played together. My father had recently got remarried after the death of my mother, so our time together was now more limited.

Those golf matches were important for both of us. For an afternoon, we could just be together, and afterwards we would go and have a bite to eat in the golf club bar. It wasn’t a posh club, just a council-run course where you paid to play. No snobs or membership fees or guys on buggies.

Whenever golf was on TV, we would watch it together. In the early 1990s, only the British Open Championship and the Ryder Cup were on TV. But we would always enjoy watching the final rounds together at the weekend. Even my stepmum enjoyed it, and it became a family tradition.

One thing I learned from playing and watching golf was the importance of etiquette. There were rules and then there were unwritten rules: rules that weren’t written down, but opponents respected, just like in other sports.

For example, in the Tour de France, if one of the leaders gets a puncture or crashes, everyone slows down to…