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It's that time of year again: The Masters, my favourite dose of noblesse oblige
I've seen it lamented numerous times here and elsewhere of the decline of noblesse oblige. I chalk it up to the internationalization of finance and wealth and the simultaneous decline in nationalism: the peers of the ultra-wealthy are the ultra-wealthy of other countries, not their neighbours or countrymen who they generally try to spend as little time as possible in the company of. God forbid that they might actually have to mix with the unwashed masses. Before you were obliged to in an attempt to forestall some peasant revolt from burning your estates, but now you've got private security defending all fourteen of your mansions, so what would really be the harm even if you lost one?
But at least in Augusta, Georgia there's some vestige of that lost spirit. Every year the Masters is held at the ultra-exclusive Augusta National Country Club, arguably the most prestigious golf tournament (give or take The Open) and the pinnacle of achievement of one of the hobbies of the elites. And every year the Masters goes overboard in creating a prestigious, elevated, and somewhat stiffly artificial environment. No expense is spared, no detail overlooked: the fairways are painted a verdant green, Rae's Creek is dyed its iconic dark blue, and the telecast features a chorus of (not-actually-present) birds so you can't hear the highway traffic. It's pure spectacle, and a treat to watch.
And you can watch it. Rather than hiking ticket prices to the eye-watering levels the open market would demand, the tournament distributes tickets via lottery ($140 for a day ticket, but if they hit the retail market they usually go for multiple thousands). And once you're on-site, the costs for food and drink are almost cartoonishly inexpensive. Oh, you couldn't secure tickets or are too far away? Well they built maybe the single-best website for watching sports: an infinitely customizable setup where you can watch whichever players or holes you wish. I've never used the app for mobile but people rave about it as well. These are both free of charge and have no region locks, and feature not one single advertisement or imposition upon the watcher. It's sporting entertainment at its ultimate best, built not for profit but purely for the prestige of being able to give it to the masses.
I don't have well-articulated thoughts on it yet, but the entire industry of golf, even outside the professional players, is maybe one of the last vestiges of 'elite' culture which hasn't been commodified down to a complete premium mediocre experience. Okay, we have to acknowledge that places like Topgolf attempt to distill the experience down to a mere amusement in the vein of bowling, but nobody, I wager, would consider it a substitute for actual golfing.
As you indicate, the lack of profit motive is obvious because the core of the industry is supported by the wealth of it's patrons, it has no need to scramble for peasant dollars. It stands to gain far more by catering to whales than relative minnows.
It is accessible to the common man in a way that, e.g. polo or downhill skiing (or on the extreme high end, Formula One Racing) certainly are not. You can practice the skills for <$20 a day at your local driving range. But it also has a near infinite cap on how much you could spend on the hobby, from top-of-the-line clubs made of exotic alloys and carbon fiber, to customized golf carts, to weekly lessons with top-skill experts. Somehow both the image of beer-chugging frat boys tooling drunkenly around the course in carts and the image of staid professionals, including CEOs of billion dollar companies and heads of state hashing out the details of vital financial/political matters between strokes can coexist here without contradiction.
And yet, AND YET, a guy who puts in the hours of practice using thrift-store clubs (that's where mine came from, growing up) will almost always win over the player who merely spent the first guy's yearly salary on equipment.
The very existence of golf courses are effectively a huge signal of the excess wealth your country produces. "We spend exorbitant amounts of money on meticulously maintaining 150+ acres of land not for growing crops, or industrial purposes, or even mass recreational games, but rather to let people wack tiny balls around in groups of 4." When you can literally devote huge swaths of prime real estate to 'nonproductive' use, you are flexing quite the surplus of capital.
It is also one of the few sports where traveling around to play at different facilities really means something as each one is designed to have unique features that will actually challenge you to adapt, rather than rigid uniformity.
There's also a delightfully nerdy aspect to it, given how many independent variables one encounters during the course of play, and slight alterations in any one of those variables (wind speed, the deflection angle of your wrist upon impact with the ball, the slope of the green, to say nothing of which club you select) can have outsized influence on the result.
And I'm not even a golf aficionado. I prefer Disc Golf as an actual hobby. But as hobbies go, there's virtually no downside, in our current culture, to being moderately competent at golfing and at least minimally conversant in the current professional scene (i.e. be able to name a few top players other than Tiger Woods, and their recent performance), since the interest can cross so many other cultural barriers, and you genuinely never know when you might get invited on a golf outing by someone influential whom you might want to make inroads with.
The game's inherent volatility is also such that the outcomes are variable enough (especially when combined with the handicap system) that it can work as a good social game in terms of the best golfer not always winning, which IMO figures into it's popularity. A bunch of more modern techy sports kind of have the issue that there's pretty huge skill demarcation. I do some bouldering and a lot of jiu-jitsu, which are both sports in which there's a good kind of conviviality but it's very hard to create a competitive game between enthusiasts and hobbyists.
Indeed, if you have your handicap dialed in you can have a 'competitive' game with even the most skilled of players.
But nobody will walk away with any illusions over who is better.
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Even among the pros there's enough variability that the worst player going into a 140+ strong tournament can put together four great rounds and win. It happens time-to-time even at the major championships
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While he's far better know for his culture war posts, Steve Sailor's golf architecture posts are consistently excellent.
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Absolutely agreed with everything here. I've only ever played a full 18 hole course once (was invited by a friend who's really good, lost to him with my handicap 30 to his hanidcap 6) but I had a very very positive view of the whole experience and would have picked up golf seriously if I had the free time for it. If someone reading this does have free time to actually get good at it, from my almost total beginner point of view it seems to be very worthwhile.
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