You think the European GCAers have it bad? Go talk to the Australian GCAers, who can't for love or money have an intelligent discussion on this site about some of the greatest golf courses in the world with anyone but themselves and the (very) odd American or European who has braved the long, expensive flights and the mega-jetlag. The general point, of course, is well taken - and it's not just people talking about what they know, but about what they can hope to know in the near future. As a general rule, people from America travel all across America all the time but rarely travel abroad, especially not to Europe and *definitely* not to Australia. Someone like the Naffer to whom that rule doesn't apply will have foreign golf courses much more strongly on his radar - he's going to be in a position to travel near them, possibly quite often, so of course he'd be interested to find out about them and talk about them. If you're not going to be abroad often, it's only natural to focus your immediate horizons on domestic issues. (If this were a truly academic site, I bet you wouldn't have this problem - but ultimately, GCA is at least as much about entertainment as it is about "Enlightenment", in the 18th Century French sense of the word.)
Rihc, I have to mention one thing: I consider myself very well versed in things pertaining to both "football" and "football", but while I can't think of a single current soccer player named Gunther (Gunther Nentz or Netz or something like that played for the great German World Cup teams of the 1970s, but that's the only one who immediately springs to mind), I do know that Gunther Cunningham was the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs as recently as four or five years ago. Funny, that...
Cheers,
Darren