In a recent article for The New Yorker magazine ("The Way of the Puffin"; April 21, 2008), Jonathan Franzen comments on golf:
"My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog."
Let's set aside the moldy cliches that clog this short passage -- the "workday-sized chunks of time" required by a round of golf (we should all have such workdays!); the "well-off white men" who play the game (a stereotype that would equally surprise both Tiger Woods and my daughter -- just to cite two examples, among millions); the "self-congratulations" of golf's etiquette (guilty as charged, and proudly so); the "self-important hush" of the announcers (a hush occasionally heard, yes, at The Masters -- but nowhere else); and the astonishingly tired observation "Spelled backward, golf is flog." (Mr. Franzen, I suppose, might have thought that an original and witty observation! We'll have to leave it to The New Yorker's legendary fact checkers -- who must have had a heckuva time with this paragraph! -- to determine what he knew and when he knew it.)
But let's leave that all aside.
Let's address a single sentence: "Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl."
Let's educate Mr. Franzen on the truth (and/or the lack thereof) and the wisdom (and/or the lack thereof) in that sentence.
And when we are finished, I will make sure to send him a link to our discussion.
We have to teach these people, one at a time.