I read a piece in The Guardian a couple of weeks or so ago under the headline ‘One Step Beyond: how walking football became a runaway success’. (Quite a clever wordplay, I thought.) There followed an article of approximately 750 words on the subject. In an accompanying sidebar, the writer mentioned three other similar variants which are gaining in popularity – walking netball, walking rugby and walking tennis. Which leads on this obvious point. What about walking golf?
But hold on! We’re already there! Mark Twain is widely acknowledged as the author of that well-known aphorism ‘golf is a good walk spoiled’. Who knows what he would have made of other sports becoming a more leisurely perambulation than as is customary, though one suspects he would not have been a fan. Having said that, the rugby variation sounds quite interesting; there are no mauls, rucks or scrums, which means that the ball does not spend an interminable amount of time out of sight which can routinely happen in the regular version.
What would be the golfing equivalent of this phenomenon? I guess it might be ‘running golf’, thereby taking the sport in an opposite direction to its traditions. A guy called Steve Scott launched the concept of SpeedGolf as long ago as 1979 but it has never taken hold in the fashion that walking football appears to have done. While slow play is never to be encouraged, golf is about how few shots you can get round in rather than how speedily you can do it.
The fastest round of golf ever played, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was (appropriately, I guess) achieved in Ireland, at Warrenpoint Golf Club in Co Down in 1987 by a man named James Carvill. It took 27 minutes and 9 seconds. (I know, some tour players can take about that to play one hole.) But the truth is that being on a golf course is generally a pleasant experience. Why would one wish to rush it away? The eternal allure of the game is its ability to enable one to banish thoughts of anything else for a while and the memory it provides of that one shot you hit last time out that makes you so eager to go back to try to do it again.
A week before that piece appeared in The Guardian, I read a column by Victoria Coren Mitchell in the Daily Telegraph. (For political balance, of course.) She wrote: “I have played golf once in my life, because I suspect there are only three options: you play never, or once, or you do nothing else for the rest of your life… It’s therapeutic to be devoted to a hobby – one into which you can really disappear, subsume the personality and quiet the restless brain – but I’ve already got one and it’s poker. I recognised the similarity of golf at once: the very unbeatability of the thing, the nightmare of it, is the core of the attraction… If I played golf a second time, I feared I would literally never do anything else.”
Yep, she gets it.
You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com as well as his golf archive on robertgreen-golf.com
