Greed, Liquor, Jingoism and Bad Taste - 8 October 1999

My sermon last week on the sinful exuberance of the American Ryder Cup team and their wives to the accompaniment of cheers and boos from - something new in golf - a raucous crowd provoked so many approving notes and letters and telephone calls that I ought to feel as happy as a cat bumping up against a carton of milk.

But two calls made me realise that much of this praise was based on an unwarranted national complacency and the second call reminded me of an element of sports, namely the fact of television, which I had not considered.

First I ought to repeat my gratitude to Mr Frank Hannigan, the former director of the United States Golf Association, for tracing the source of the spectators' rowdiness - the crossing of the line of civility, as he put it - to a poisonous mixture of greed, liquor, jingoism and bad taste.

That's correct. But why, suddenly, should these vices intrude into a sport that has been watched, on the ground, for centuries by people of every sort and class all of whom, until a few years ago, clapped good play, stayed silent whenever a player just missed a putt or produced a bad shot?

Indeed not one of those causes but all four, it seems to me, are new - greed, liquor, jingoism and bad taste.

Jingoism, in a more or less mild form, will always be present at international competitions. And, as we've seen in soccer, bad taste is a very mild description of the outrages committed in Europe by hipped-up soccer fans.

I'm afraid the record of travelling English soccer fans has forever, in this country certainly, transformed the standard image of what it is to be an Englishman. Just as, I fear, the Ryder Cup horror has tainted the symbolic American.

But greed and liquor - a couple of puzzling exotic vices to connect with golf surely.

Mr Hannigan is right. He puts it down to what I call the transformation of big golf tournaments into trade fairs and he identifies as the institution of the hospitality tent.

Most people who watch golf casually on television would, I think, be amazed to visit in the flesh any of the big professional tournaments. Not the big four only, the so-called Grand Slam tournaments.

You at first wonder where the course is. You find yourself in an outdoor bargain basement, if, as Bertie Wooster used to say, you know what I mean. A place devoted exclusively to stands that display and sell sports goods and products and flags and souvenirs and buttons and bows but are all overshadowed by these great white tents.

Possibly, I first thought, they were filming the Battle of Agincourt. These are the hospitality tents set up by a single firm. What's the firm doing there? Ah, now we're down to the nerve of the whole enterprise.

The firm is a bank, or a liquor manufacturer, or a manufacturer of sporting equipment and they are sponsoring the event and usually they are stressing their love of the game and your love of their product by buying time on television and, on television, repeating the uniqueness of the thing they make.

In the hospitality tents there flows champagne for the toffs. Toffs for a day. And beer for the plebs flows freely - and free.

The reminder I forgot was that this institution, the transformation of a sporting event into a trade fair, started - wait for it - in England.

I'd hate to think it started in Scotland, though it was there that I first saw a famous course disguised as an advertising circus. And I'm still appalled to see the players in a Scottish national tournament address the ball on a tee where the splendid skyscape and the mountains beyond are more or less blotted out by a huge liquor advertisement right behind the man teeing off.

I'm much relieved to tell you that advertising billboards do not appear on American golf courses. And, I hardly dare to mention it since it may give some movie distributor an idea, we have never had advertising motion picture shorts in cinemas.

Another English friend called to warn me that if I managed to come to England again and thought I'd like, which I might well, watch my first cricket match in about 40 years, I'd discover that money and entertainment and so-called hospitality have taken over that hallowed game too. In fact he couldn't think of a sport that had not been seduced into the plump and wealthy arms of advertisers.

Another gloomy Englishman called me up just to announce, what I'm sure is true - you're never going to stop the flow of beer.

But apart from rowdiness produced by the demon rum, beer, or champagne or whatever, the existence of television itself as an incomparable medium for covering sports, which it is, has vastly increased the audience and combine the medium with its power to hype and glorify individual athletes.

When I say glorifying individual athletes I don't mean just showing them being heroic at their sport. I'm thinking of the need, the pressing need, of an advertiser to keep on about him as a wearer or user of their product.

In fact we've all become more familiar with the faces of many athletes than with the faces of movie stars. Not from seeing them in performance but because several times a day we see them extolling the unique merits of this golf ball, that racket, the breathtaking superiority of this shoe over that.

Now no one is more of a victim and the hero of this treatment than a young man known three years ago to nobody outside Stanford University in California and the minority of golfing grey beards who follow international amateur golf. After turning pro and winning a major tournament with four dazzling rounds I doubt he will ever repeat in his life, a youngster named Tiger Woods found within a month or two that he had a $50m contract with a shoe company - golf shoes are very much alike no matter who makes them - and 10 or whatever more millions from a credit card company, whereupon young Mr Woods fell back among a small pack of the best players and in the next 18 months won two tournaments.

Meanwhile David Duvall won 11 tournaments but he's not pretty, he's not the offshoot of a black soldier and a Siamese Thai mother - and whoever heard of David Duvall except the American army of marvelling golf fans?

But we had to see Tiger Woods every day and every evening in advertisements for those shoes, for that card and those two sponsors, thinking of the 60-odd million dollars they'd sunk in him, must have had some sleepless nights for a year or more when he didn't seem to be winning anything and was number 130 on the American tour in putting.

They must be immensely relieved that finally, into his third year as a professional, he strikingly improved his putting, began to fulfil the promise of his youth and won a second major tournament.

At his age Jack Niclaus had won four but comparisons, I know, comparisons between generations are odious and unfair. Let's wait.

On second thought I think you'd better wait and see if throughout the next four years Tiger can match the immortal Bobby Jones's record of entering only 20 majors in seven years - winning 13 and coming second in four and retiring at the age of 28.

I must say Tiger Woods, to his great credit, has started at least one foundation for the rescue, through golf, rescue from the slums of black children and he gives to this foundation not just a big slab of money but time, all the spare time he can squeeze in from his compulsory appearances in exhibitions and sponsoring companies' outings and making endless commercials for his backers.

He must, at the age of 23, spend some nights of dazed incomprehension of his plight - the calendar of duties and tensions that have become his life - for which, I doubt, even $60m is any balm or blessing.

More than anyone in golf he is unwittingly, it's not his fault, responsible for tripling the size of the crowds for tournaments. The tripling force being people who know nothing about golf, hear he's the best there is, expect him to win every week - not even the greatest golfers have won every year - and thanks to the daily dinning repetition of his image on television attracts people from football, hockey, wherever, to give golf a go, to go and cheer and boo and behave the way circus crowds behaved in old Cecil B DeMille pictures of ancient Rome.

I think the final word is the brief, blunt, reminder of my old English friend - "You won't put a stop to the beer."

I should add that since the lamentable end of the Ryder Cup every American I've spoken to agrees in lamenting the awful episode innocently provoked by the delirious Justin Leonard - poor fellow he was desperate with his apologies later.

The New York Times too was running over with letters all echoing the same laments and fears for what it had done to the notion abroad of American golfers.

But there was one writer - weirdly it is the Times's chief sports writer, a man I know to be a genial expert writer on many sports - and he, I have one good friend in California who seconds him, he applauds the whole performance - not the obscenities or the spitting of course, I imagine he too deplored the drunks - but he welcomes the arrival of the common man or what Mr Hannigan called the new breed - the golf hooligan.

Enough, he implies, of the old fuddy duddies in blue blazers, the Eastern preppies, the stiff-necked, class-ridden Wimbledon types - that is still an American cliché about the nicer people who run tennis. Enough, he cries, bring on Bully Bottom and the buddies from his pub and the jolly guys who normally scream at ice hockey players bruising each other.

What other game with an international audience no less requires absolute silence from 25,000 onlookers? Ridiculous. The more the merrier. This is the great age of democracy isn't it?

So it is.

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