Anyone who has ever taken up an iron and swung vainly at that infinitesimal ball will know that golf was invented by dour, unrelenting Puritan masochists to remind themselves of the awfulness of life and the pointlessness of endeavour.
Professional golfers, delusional Tinkerbells one and all, talk about motivation, achievement and satisfaction, and have thus failed utterly to understand the soul of golf — for golf, like northern Scotland on a windy day, is Purgatory.
Watching the British Open meander along in all its bleak misery, one had to wonder what the locals think. Not the convivial laddies in the commentary box, burring away to each other in half-whispers about the cracking tea they had yesterday, but the woolly jocks skulking lugubriously beyond the television vans, alternately stroking a single niblick and a lame, blind Border collie. What does old Fergus, caddie to the stars of the 1930s, think of this modern stuff?
For starters, he thinks the prize money on offer is an obscenity. When he was a lad, back in the 17th Century, they used to have to play
36 holes a day for a lump of coal, if they were lucky.
And if they’re going to be throwing about millions of British pounds, at least make it a useful amount, enough to buy a tropical island replete with dusky princesses and some pork chops for the dog.
Then there’s the weather. The Scots have 17 different words for rain, but somehow the nuances have been forgotten with all this golf being played in New Mexico and California.
Fergus points out the difference between driving rainy, horizontal sleet and sleety, horizontal rain. The former is fine for a short game, wedges and the like, while the latter is excellent for the long irons, bedding down one’s ball nice and snug in the sodden seagrass so it doesn’t bound along into the raging North Sea.
Not that it’s impossible, mind you: old Wallace once managed a triple-bogey after he refused to lose his ball (the wee bastards cost three pence, you know) and five-putted, standing chest-deep in brine. Aye, golf in winter has its own charms, like sending the beastie (either a dog or young Hamish, the blacksmith’s boy) tunnelling through snowdrifts after a ball, or skipping a drive off
an ice-sheet to get an extra 45m
of distance.
But then these modern milksops wouldn’t know about that, the way they rush to the aerodrome and board their private monoplanes at the first hint of a chill in the air.
The crowds that come to watch have changed over the years. In the glory days your village would come and walk beside you, hurling cheery abuse and bracing obscenities to keep your mind focused.
Today it’s all Americans with potato faces and expensive clothes, trampling about the greens in their huge lumberjack boots. Next thing they’ll spray the out-of-bounds area with Agent Orange to make the walk less demanding.
Speaking of which, have you seen the clubs the laddies use nowadays? Monstrous great blobs that could fire a ball clear to Cork. That Woods boy wouldn’t be half so proud of himself if he had a bag like they played with in the old days: a niblick, a putter, a shovel for snow and coal, one spare ball (the wee bastards cost three pence, you know) and a change of socks for when you have to putt in the ocean.
If the wife had won at bingo or the welfare cheque had come, a fellow might also pack a smoked sardine to chew on later in the afternoon, but wrapped in newspaper because nobody likes a show-off. But perhaps the greatest abomination of modern golf, says Fergus, is the winner’s speech.
There he goes, this new yank who isn’t Woods, thanking this and thanking that, praising his fellow players, talking up Scotland as if we bloody need talking up, as if we’re Nebraska or New Hampshire or one of those other blighted American hell-holes.
Why can’t a fellow be honest when he wins the Open? Why can’t he say, ‘I don’t trust your dodgy southern banks, I’ll take cash, all in tenners,” and then give the losers a right rollicking, maybe show them the finger or lift the kilt and moon them? It’s enough to make a lad ill.
Luckily, the Missis won at the bingo, so Fergus can chew on his smoked sardine as he starts the -long walk home.