Here's to the bad golfers

I can't watch golf on television. I never could. Before I started playing golf, the flattened, boob-tube version seemed so boring. The announcers spoke too quietly, the audiences responded too softly and the action – following the arc of a white ball into what was often a gray or cloudy sky – too lazy.

"Of course you don't like to watch it; you don't play golf," my friends who did watch the sport on TV would say. "If you played, you'd appreciate it more."

He's probably not watching golf.

Except that now I play. And I still don't appreciate golf on television. I've tried watching The Golf Channel but it holds no appeal. All my reasons for disliking the televised version of the game remain the same, with one addition:

I'm more interested in bad golf.

I can watch football, basketball and baseball on television with great interest because I can't -- and don't -- play any of those sports. It's the same reason guys watch action movies. 

Allmoviephotos.com

Doesn't everyone want to be Tom Cruise?

The game's appeal is in its participation, the fact that anyone can get out and attempt to play, no matter how awful. Oh, and most of us are awful. If we weren't then we'd be the ones featured on Sunday afternoon television during the football off-season, sinking putts and hawking Buicks.

I'm not alone in this sentiment, and not even close to one of the originators of this idea. I was surprised to read that A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, was a terrible golfer. But did he let this get him down? Of course not. The man fought in World War I, for crying out loud. Instead, Milne celebrated the sport because it lets people like him (and me) participate. No other sport, he said, allows you to be quite so awful. He wrote this in his essay, "TheCharm of Golf," in 1919:

"Consider what it is to be bad at lawn tennis. True, you are allowed to hold on to your new racket all through the game, but how often are you allowed to employ it usefully? How often does your partner cry "Mine!" and bundle you out of the way? Is there pleasure in playing football badly? You may spend the full eighty minutes in your new boots, but your relations with the ball will be distant. They do not give you a ball to yourself at football.

"But how different a game is golf. At golf it is the bad player who gets the most strokes. However good his opponent, the bad player has the right to play out each hole to the end; he will get more than his share of the game. He need have no fears that his new driver will not be employed. He will have as many swings with it as the scratch man; more, if he misses the ball altogether upon one or two tees."

Well put. I can hardly believe this is the man who once prompted the great Dorothy Parker to declare in a book review of Milne's "The House at Pooh Corner": 

"Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

She should have seen him play.

What's the appeal of watching golf on television? Inquiring minds want to know.