There is a new variant of golf teeing off around the UK leaving Richard Nye feeling distinctly under par
Richard Nye
James II of Scotland must be turning in his grave. This was the monarch who famously banned golf and football – or ‘futebawe and ye golf’, as he put it – lest participants should dissipate energies better used in target practice for the defence of the realm.
Both games, of course, have since enjoyed something of a revival. Now the comeback is complete: welcome to the weird and wacky world of footgolf.
As explained in our Child's Play column for January (see the Families section), the aim of this unhallowed hybrid is to kick balls into oversized holes on courses previously dedicated to golf in premutational form. And this, verily, is one of the UK’s fastest-growing sports.
"Young people, explained a spokesman for one centre, can no longer stomach traditional golf, as “it’s technical, expensive and takes a long time.” With footgolf, however, they can “do something relatively successfully straight away” and thus obtain “instant satisfaction”.
Oh, and it generally goes down a bomb at stag dos.
Now let’s be fair. It is true that the imperative for archery practice has dimmed somewhat since 1457. Sure, we live in troubled times, overhung by the shadow of an irrational, hysterical entity that could, if not vigorously opposed, become the most powerful force on Earth. Donald Trump aside, however, it’s not clear how firing arrows into the air is the answer to evil in the cyberage.
But while it’s great to have golf and football back, one has the deeply ingrained sense that – not unlike jet-skiing and jungle juice – they were meant to be enjoyed separately. Mixing the two is like the worst form of musical sampling: recognisable parts of different songs, but without any of the nuances.
The point can be overstretched: this new sport, in one sense, is just a piece of harmless fun. Yet on another level it betrays more than it knows. For footgolf is a piece of postmodern madness that is dispiritingly emblematic of our age.
Tim Aldridge Photography
All the great games to have captured the British heart have their roots in particular historical contexts: football is the child of industry, rugby union of the public schools, racing of the Stuart court. Cricket’s cradle was the soft underbelly of England, its mission field the lands of imperial sun. Even darts and snooker have their story, obscured by the smoke-wreathed shadows of an upper room or the fug of a backstreet pub.
But footgolf? Well, if – and it’s a big ‘if’ – this sporting aberration were to outlast the blink of an eye, historians might well record that it was the offspring of cultural exhaustion; a product of the attention-deficit society in which everyone from governments to football managers is required to deliver overnight.
Golf may indeed be ‘technical’ and ‘take a long time’. But therein lies the measure of its worth. It is the very fact that mastery is so elusive, coupled with its aesthetic appeal, that will keep golf soaring down the fairway long after the corpse of footgolf has been buried in impenetrable rough.
