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The Golden Era of Golf
How America Rose to Dominate
the Old Scots Game
By Al Barkow
Thomas Dunne Books, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25238-2 $25.95
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This encyclopedic "People's History" of the American golf century recounts the key events and personalities. It also informally pegs the game within the grand themes that transformed the nation and, on the side, turned a pastoral Scottish game into a Sporting Industrial Complex.
There is the money trail, the compulsion over image and "sizzle," the entrepreneurial zeal, television's indelible imprint. Along the way there is also the triumph of the immigrant work ethic and drive that changed names (Saraceni to Sarazen, Coppola to Couples) and created empires and superstars.
The distinct American twist on neuroses is no less remarkable than the shot-making: painting golf courses green to make them more telegenic, racial undertows (denying Charlie Sifford a career and at the very least a cigar endorsement), and the wee ice mon-ic suffering of Hogan.
In American hands golf became a business and the golf course an office, a marketing tool, and a statement of American largesse and scale. On rare and regrettable occasions the game, under American duress, was also forced to vacate its high ground for displays "of supreme and overbearing arrogance,"
as at the Brookline Ryder Cup.
The author calls it a "resourceful, commercially oriented New World dynamism." Barnum, or George May, as creative an innovator this side of Bill Veeck, might've used other words, but the spillover and spoils into golf from America's rise are undeniable.
Once the ride to prominence was on a "freight elevator." Today, the author writes, with television as a motor lubricated with corporate dollars, it's up a "smooth escalator."
Much of the story is explained by juxtaposing two words: 'golf' and 'professional.' The golf professional was the subservient employee in the best Victorian tradition. Professional golf, by contrast, may not be entirely of American origin but, for all intents, we own the patent and have since the modern age began. (Whether this will continue and the consequences of American dominance are not addressed - this is golf after all, not sociology; bigger questions perhaps best left to the 19th hole.)
Along the way, we're given everything from early Legends of Golf Nielsen ratings (boffo!) to highlights of legal testimony from various club controversies. There's even a brief analysis of the hug extended by Nick Faldo to Greg Norman at the conclusion of the '96 Masters.
Was the hug a) A sign of "a more worldly, compassionate attitude" among the millionaires?
Or b) ". . .because they are all so well-off financially compared to the previous generations that they can indulge in more humane behavior toward their fellow competitors?"
You make the call.
Upbeat as the highlights are, to the seasoned eye of the author, progress can be a mixed blessing. The installment of sprinklers on the Old Course at St. Andrews, for instance, is viewed as akin to "Ella Fitzgerald scat singing the Koran or an Orthodox rabbi ordering ham hocks and a glass of milk on the first day of Passover."
There are plenty of heroes and of course a few rogues. In addition to the legacy of the "all-exempt" tour (of which the author approves), Deane Beman, we learn, left behind a wife and four children, one of them retarded, when he became PGA Tour commissioner. Beman "had the instincts of an autocrat. . .not entirely humorless, but laughter was something with which he was not generally associated." He or Masters domo Clifford Roberts, at another time, would've made good robber barons.
Other outtakes:
Jack Nicklaus: "the proverbial bastard who grinds you down. . . .Like Michael Jordan in basketball two decades later. . .changed the way his game was played. Golf became a game played in the air. It was another of his, and America's, major influences on the old Scots game."
Lee Trevino: "a reminder of the depression era pros, but without the grim exterior."
Gary Player: "the Napoleon complex, ball and stick division."
The story and century ends with Tiger, who assumes his place as the pinnacle, the embodiment of all those he succeeds, a convenient, multi-cultural culmination of societal forces and American golf hegemony. (And not averse to the occasional hug.)
To consider how time passes, look way back when there was another authentic American 'Tiger,' a U.S. Open winner at 19, Johnny McDermott of Philadelphia.
In hindsight, McDermott may have just been ahead of his time. He talked "trash" from that deep American well of sports bravado brought to bear on the latter twentieth century. Standing before Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, after beating them, he laid it out. The U.S. Open trophy was in no danger of going overseas, he said. It was, for its day, an ugly incident that provoked outrage and an official rebuke from the USGA. Today, it would hardly be worth noticing.
McDermott teed it up shortly thereafter at Brookline in 1913, but the day was won by a more modest and archetypal representative, Francis Ouimet. A.W. Tillinghast described McDermott's play in the 1913 U.S. Open as "like a dead man." Apparently, he never recovered from the incident and was institutionalized for the rest of his life. How much different things might have been had McDermott kept his head, we can only guess.
But just imagine how much a supremely confident young two-time U.S. Open champion like McDermott might be worth today in endorsements. It was not to be. A sense of timing and pathos has been very much part of the American story in many areas, so it is also with golf.
The bottom line of big-time golf is determined in dollars, true enough, but the game and those who play it remain buffeted by an Old Testament spin on justice. The fates, or, as we know it, the rub of the green have claimed Hogan, Arnold, Greg Norman, and all the rest of the famously snake-bit. Someday, it will even catch up with Tiger. Whatever we've done to golf, financially, technologically, with the best of intentions, the game has retained its essence and beauty. In that regard, the Scottish legacy, thankfully, remains in tact.
Duly Noted - Edition I - Shouting at Amen Corner
Duly Noted - Edition II - Precision Putting
Duly Noted - Edition III - In the Women's Clubhouse
Duly Noted - Edition IV - Royal and Ancient
Duly Noted - Edition V - Into the Bear Pit
Duly Noted - Edition VI - The Biography of Walter J. Travis
Duly Noted - Edition VII - Uneven Lies
Duly Noted - Edition VIII - Sir Walter & Mr. Jones
Duly Noted - Edition IX - The Golf Ball Book
Duly Noted - Edition X - Balls!
Duly Noted - Edition XI - To Brookline and Back
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