MULLIGAN MULLIGAN
The Independent Voice Am I alone in my dismay at our national
newspapers’ attitude towards golf? For nine tenths of the year the game gets no mention in their pages at all. Then, come the Open, Masters, US Open (only when staged on America’s east coast) or Ryder Cup (every other year), we receive lashings of coverage written by journalists who spend most of their lives concentrating on other sports. The Times, once a heartland for the nation’s
golfers along with the Daily Telegraph and to a lesser extent the Daily Mail, doesn’t even have a golf correspondent. Instead, it seems happier to serve up endless piffle about lower-division football, complete with groin- strain bulletins and managerial platitudes, than acknowledge a sport in which the British Isles boasts two members of the world top-10 (McIlroy and Rose) and a further 10 players ranked between 11th and 60th. Tennis, which commands five times as
much space, has one solitary UK shining light – world No.3 Andy Murray – while the rest are nowhere. Rory McIlroy, in case this fact has escaped sports editors, is also ranked third in the world. And as for our great team games – the ‘God’
football, rugby union (in the wake of a disastrous World Cup for the home countries) and cricket, which really does suffer from a nationwide participation problem – our international status is best described as modest. However, that doesn’t seem to stand in their way when they go hunting for publicity and exposure. The final straw came when the Sunday Times reflected that golf “must address slow play, dress code, cost and its ageing profile”. The headline writer would have included muzzling equipment as well but didn’t have room.
So that’s why we don’t read about golf in our newspapers or see it on our terrestrial TV
channels anymore! Too much slow play (chief ‘culprits’ in my lifetime being those ‘dullards’ Ballesteros, Faldo, Langer and Nicklaus), too many participants wanting to wear jeans and being told they can’t, too much expense (’twas ever thus), too many old buffers with monocles and chauvinist views, and a surfeit of state-of-the-art balls and clubs – a Eureka, light-bulb moment, surely? Not! These clichés are older than the
aforementioned buffers. And at the time when they were more pertinent than they are now, 25 years ago, the game was in rude health. There’s no denying golf today has a
problem – most clubs are losing money, the market place for manufacturers is shrinking and there are too many counter attractions, deterring women and juniors in particular from taking it up. The game is also difficult to learn and requires a lifetime of old-fashioned perseverance. Yet the reason golf is struggling in the
second decade of the 21st century has little to do with dress codes, slow play, expense, snobbery or technology. Starved of the oxygen of publicity, it is not allowed to compete for the nation’s attention with other sports and pastimes on a level playing field. Every golf event of any significance is now hidden away on Sky (which, not irrelevantly, has the same owner as The Times and Sunday Times). It would be easy to blame this on
politically-motivated budget constraints at the BBC. But the truth is the European Tour and R&A have been seduced by Murdoch’s millions, and golf is the poorer for it.
Happy Hacking! Mulligan
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