Wall Street Journal
GOLF JOURNAL OCTOBER 18, 2008 Golf's Crash Course in Humility Its legacy as an indulgence for the wealthy is back in play. How did that happen? By MARK FROST
Not long after he turned over the Oval Office in 1909 to his friend and hand-picked successor, Teddy Roosevelt wrote a letter to President William Howard Taft, urging him to discontinue his rounds of golf at Chevy Chase Country Club. Photos of America's leader spending afternoons on the links, former President Roosevelt warned, sent the wrong message to the public, especially in the wake of the Panic of 1907, when the government intervened to rescue the banking system. President Taft, a lifelong golfer who, to put it mildly, needed the exercise, told Teddy to mind his own damn business. Angrier words were exchanged, spilling over into issues of policy. Three years later, still gnashing his teeth at Taft's betrayal, former President Roosevelt threw his hat into the presidential ring as a last-minute third-party candidate. The Republican vote, effectively split, resulted in the election of an obscure governor from New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. President Taft continued to play golf throughout his life, helping to legitimize the sport, although it remained within its firmly etched class lines. (Teddy stuck to tennis.) Forty years later, President Eisenhower's unapologetic embrace of the game dissolved many of its elitist associations and golf completed its journey to middle-class respectability. Presidents have played the game ever since with varying degrees of skill and obsession, but without fear of backlash or rebuke. Until May of this year, when President George W. Bush -- whose family ties to the patrician roots of American golf reach back three generations -- announced that he was giving up the game. Photos of the commander in chief on a golf course while our armed forces remain at war overseas, he had determined, were good for neither morale nor image. A few months later, that president's image appears beyond repair, and the country, indeed the world, faces a crisis of grave portent and vast uncertainty; May 2008 suddenly seems like the good old days. Golf's symbolic legacy as an indulgence for the wealthy appears to have come back into play. How it became "their game" to begin with may shed light on where it goes from here. Golf, in the way it evolved from the Scots' pastoral relationship with their land, and the way they played it, began life as an egalitarian pastime. Their courses were public parks where all could play free of charge. They abstained on the Sabbath, but "the green" availed itself for all to enjoy the pleasures of the open air. Social clubs formed to organize play, and they codified the game's evolving rules. Ideas of privacy and exclusivity, however, wouldn't arrive until the early 19th century, when the English took the game south, conforming it to their more rigid class structure. Instead of using public spaces, club members now chipped in to buy land for their courses as private holdings. Gates and fences followed. With admittance now viewed as a "private" issue, decisions about whom to let in led to restrictions about whom to leave out. The game reached America in the late 19th century based largely on the English variation; the first clubs in New England established themselves as bastions where the socially prominent could remove themselves from teeming urban centers; these "country" clubs served as their Edenic sanctuaries. Although their courses were designed -- and they were taught the game -- by generations of working-class Scots immigrants, the upper class paternalistically came to think of it as "their game." The founding of the U.S. Golf Association in 1894 formalized this stewardship. Amateur championships came first, but the USGA's annual "Open" competitions encouraged golf's emergence as a "professional" sport and, as lower-class caddies like Francis Ouimet and Walter Hagen won championships, it attracted broader public interest. Then Bobby Jones, while upper middle class and an avowed amateur, transcended all social definitions with his genius for the game and became its first international avatar. A second wave of private clubs appeared to service an expanding white-collar class; they became the business world's locker room. Hundreds of cities built their first public courses, making the game accessible to all; thanks to Jones, the game's exclusive association with affluence had begun to change. But many of those clubs would not survive the Crash of '29. Coupled with Jones's retirement in 1930, the Depression nearly killed the nascent structure of the game. Jones's own Augusta National, a course built with Wall Street money for princes of industry, barely scraped by, aided by interest in a pro-am tournament that Jones created to sell memberships: The Masters. Through that troubled decade and then World War II, the game's struggling professional tour, gaining traction on the strength of stars Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan, held on by its fingernails. The Eisenhower era revived every aspect of the sport. Ike joined Augusta before the country called him to the White House in 1952, forever coupling America's most influential club to the corridors of power. When Arnold Palmer captured America's imagination with his televised heroics, he capitalized on those connections to become the game's first player-tycoon. After a half-century of struggle, top pros could look ahead at the merging lanes of the PGA, Madison Avenue and Main Street and see a highway paved with gold. Golf rode the prime of Jack Nicklaus into a broad social acceptance that would have been unthinkable only two decades before. Then came Tiger, the next avatar. He swept away most of the last vestiges of "restriction." Golf was big business now, and money streamed in from flush and eager corporate partners. High-end daily-fee courses cropped up like weeds, offering amenities that had remained out of most players' reach. The trend culminated in the appearance of a new breed of private club that catered to the super rich -- and charged accordingly; membership as conspicuous status symbol -- that would have shocked the Old Money aristocrats of the early USGA. Most of the money for those courses and their membership fees flowed from superheated Wall Street spigots; then greed, hubris and the stubborn human inability to see danger coming from a distance led to September 2008. Amid the economic wreckage of all this steroidal excess, the future of golf's high-flying recent past seems at best uncertain. The grand old clubs, built on sustaining cultures rooted deep in their communities, will weather any storm, but many of those daily-fee courses had already gone under; and the survivors face hard times. Corporations will no longer have the same discretionary funds to express their affection for golf. The image of the game itself has taken a hit from these cautionary tales of executive excess. The number of amateur golfers has flat-lined and with an injured Tiger on the sidelines, so have TV ratings. A path forward can be found in the recent victory of the U.S. Ryder Cup team; a group of untested kids and seasoned veterans putting their egos aside, and playing their guts out for nothing but pride. Captain Paul Azinger borrowed a page from the Scots, who still play golf the way they've always done on their local, minimal masterpiece tracks. Their game, taken to heart, teaches discipline, equilibrium, modesty, moral rectitude and the lesson that any player forgets at their peril: Golf, like life, is a humbling game.
Mark Frost is the author of "The Greatest Game Ever Played" and "The Match," and co-creator of the TV series "Twin Peaks." His next book, "Game Six," the story of the 1975 World Series, will be published in fall of 2009.
