Golf in Russia

For personal reasons, I had to make a flying visit to England last week and so had the luck of not joining the 400 correspondents who were in Moscow telling us exactly what happened at the summit. Astonishing to read now how many of them must have been at different summits.

One of the useful things about a flying visit to the listeners' country is the discovery that something I've been usually deploring as an American novelty has already passed over into European life and is taken for granted. I watched the Derby on the telly in London and was shocked to see that it's no longer the Derby, but something called the Ever Ready Derby. It was even more of a shock when the moment came for what a commentator called the ancient ritual, the laying of the treasured blanket on the winner, to see the splendid Kahyasi as a galloping reminder that perhaps you need a new battery.

One time, oh it must be ten years ago, I did a talk which, if talks had titles, would have been called 'the money game'. It was a sustained lamentation for the over-commercialising of most sports with a bitter note to the effect that tennis had now joined the money-grubbing parade and it ended with thanks to God that golf remained untainted, uncorrupted, squeaky-clean. My gratitude was premature.

The prize money for the professional golf tournaments in this country, as also in Europe, has been going up and up in the past few years, so much so that when a commentator remarked of an American pro on a streak, when he turned to the veteran star, Byron Nelson, and said, 'Do you realise, Byron, that he's won over $200,000 in three weeks?' The southern Mr Nelson plaintively replied, 'Nobody has to tell me! That's more than I earned in my entire career!'. The young man on the regular tour today who never comes in higher than, say, 15th, will wind up the season with more money than the great Hogan earned in 20 years.

And now the tournaments which we used to identify as the Los Angeles Open or the Colonial are called things like the Singing Sam Coastal Savings Open and the Romanov Brothers Equity and Mutual Colonial.

Last April, the president of the Augusta National Golf Club which, alone, runs the sacred Masters since Bobby Jones started it in 1934, said at the annual dinner honouring, of all people, the invited amateurs, 'Any time that the Masters comes to be known as the Pizza Hut Masters will be time to close it down'.

I should guess that no other sporting tournament in the world is so blessedly bereft of a commercial presence as the Masters, the American Masters. The two sponsors expose themselves at unusually long intervals on the telecast. There are no placards or billboards or sportswear tents or other intrusions on the rolling pastures or the flower-banked creeks. The caddies wear loose green tunics. No commentator is allowed to mention the dollar value of a putt or even the amount of the prize money.

However, there is one nasty innovation that the club regrets but can do nothing about. It came in furtively only a year or two ago. Most of the competing pros on tour now wear white visors, not because the American sun blazes brighter than it used to, but because manufacturers of everything from golf balls to biscuits and sportswear got to them and suggested no harm would be done if they wore a visor carrying the company's logo or simply the name. No harm, surely, especially since the manufacturers made the suggestion with a contract already in their fists. How about 30 thousand a year, 50 maybe, for just innocently wearing our visor? Fine!

So the visual effect has been to throw a black shadow on the faces of a whole generation of young pros and make them indistinguishable except as clones of any standard young, tall, tanned, grim Californian or Texan. It's got so that from a distance there are only two pros who can be instantly recognisable. Most of the time they wear only their own hair. They have not signed a contract. They are Nicklaus and Watson.

Last winter, I was up in snow-bound Vermont watching, with my nine-year-old grandson, the end of a tournament being played, need I say, somewhere in California or Arizona. He's not a golfer but his horse had to stay warm in the stable and I had to leave the house for some chore and when I came back, the game was over. 'Who won?' I said. He looked up and said, with absolutely no guile, 'I think Titleist beat Nabisco'.

And I hear from an old friend, a Welshman and an amateur who once dazzled the world of international rugby, that it's the same with sports in Britain. And so it will remain, I suppose, until the next recession – which, by the way, even the most conservative economists and money men in the United States place next summer – at the latest, autumn.

Which is one reason why I notice my Republican friends find themselves in a pitiful and quite new dilemma. Naturally, they want to see Vice President Bush move up to the presidency but they know that incumbent presidents, like incumbent football coaches, always get the blame for a losing game and if there is a slump, it and all its attendant evils will not be attributed to the old Reagan game plan, but to the new captain in the White House.

The same horrid vision has occurred to some, not many, Democrats and I know people who maintain that Governor Cuomo of New York knew very well what he was doing when, with noble protestations of devotion to the people of New York state, he thrice or more refused the crown.

I even know one shameless old pro who maintains that Governor Cuomo, a devout Catholic, Governor Cuomo, at his daily devotions, prays fervently for the election of Mr Bush so that in 1992 he, the governor, can emerge as Moses, bravely willing to clean up the Republican disaster and lead the people onwards and upwards to that well-managed Democratic Utopia which dear Mr Dukakis says he'll initiate on the day of his inauguration next January.

Well, it's time to get back up to the summit. I've more than hinted that I have become totally incapable of saying how much progress, if any, was made because of my fatal habit of reading too many newspapers. There is, however, one aspect, one theme, of the summit which, in the only paper I've seen it mentioned, was falsely reported on. It says here, and I wish I'd been there, 'A Russian on the platform of the summit nerve centre' – that's a very bizarre, anatomical picture – 'the Russian offered to the world's press a definition of golf. Golf, he said, is a sports game which originated in Scotland. The idea is to cover a certain number of holes with a certain number of hits'.

Not bad! But what has this to do with the destruction of intermediate weapons, which are known in golf as mid-irons? It was an introduction to Mr Armand Hammer, the American oil multimillionaire who's been a pal of the Soviet Union and each of its leaders since Lenin, and who, throughout all the successive anti-Communist crusades in America, from 1919 on through McCarthy, through Nixon, through Ronald 'Evil Empire' Reagan, has, so far as I know, never been cited for contempt of Congress or refused a visa or otherwise persecuted for his flirtation with the devil.

Mr Hammer is a placid little man, well along in his eighties and, sure enough, he not only showed up in Moscow, but took to that platform at the nerve centre of the summit. Mr Hammer was there to announce that he's responsible for introducing the Russians to golf and is about to build their first golf course. Well, I wish to say that Mr Hammer may have put up the money, which is his usual privilege, but he's 14 years behind the times in introducing the idea.

The idea started with a Soviet diplomat in 1973 who returned from an assignment in the decadent West, hopelessly hooked on the Scottish form of torture. This man was a friend of the mayor of Moscow who was a friend of Mr Brezhnev, remember him? Mr Brezhnev said OK to the mayor and the mayor got in touch with an American golf architect name of Robert Trent Jones Junior, no relation. And on a memorable day in 1974, Mr Jones telephoned me – I was in San Francisco – and asked me to lunch with the Russian consul-general at the San Francisco Golf Club.

I was assigned to his elbow and I convinced him that golf was not a rich man's game, but the regular, humble game of the Scottish people. OK, he said, and Mr Jones and his team got busy showing the consul-general a series of slides of virgin landscapes in Sweden, Thailand, wherever, being bulldozed and seeded and bedded and turned into golf courses. We even saw a stretch of land outside Moscow being surveyed by the mayor and his relapsed buddy. Many nods and handshakes. It was going to happen.

I did a talk about it and predicted that, I think this was... it was '74, and predicted that any month Mr Brezhnev would approach a stretched ribbon with a pair of shears and address the comrades of all the Socialist Soviet Republics with the stirring invitation, 'Let us play golf, the people's sport!' Well, relations went up, they went down, Mr Brezhnev disappeared and was succeeded, it seems, by a whole troop of general secretaries. Young Mr Jones told me from time to time it was on, it was off, it would never happen. Now, under Mr Gorbachev, it is going to happen. Maybe.

Only one more thing to say about the general progress of greed, the money game. It was said best by the immortal Mickey Wright, one of the handful of truly great women golfers and she was interviewed the other week on television.

She said, 'Of course it's right that star athletes should be paid well, like other entertainers, but when a golfer or a baseball player is paid four times as much as the secretary of state, it's worse than ridiculous, it's obscene.'

So said the emperor's wife about the gladiators in the decline of Ancient Rome.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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