When I become President, every golf course in the United States will be grazing land.
Same thing with shopping malls.
National Park Service Uprooted on the National Mall
I know how to play golf, but I don't golf. It's boring and sanitized. The kind of sport for people who want to go outside, but fear the outside, or are hopelessly urban. Granted, that's not the fault of all of the hopelessly urban, and that's the place for golf.
Golf is one of those sports that underwent an evolution in my mind when I was quite young. I won't say that is rational or correct.
My mother was a first rate golfer. My father didn't golf at all. None of the men I knew when very young golfed, and when I came to know some that did, as I aged, they were men who didn't do the things, or didn't do them to the same extent, as the men I knew. Golfing men didn't hunt much, they didn't fish much, they weren't going to be found at brandings. They all tended to be from the upper upper middle class, or the lower wealthy. In my mind, they were effeminized as they were playing what seemed to me to be an effeminate sport.
That view of golf hasn't changed much for me and indeed its been reenforced as I've grown older. I know that there are some really manly men that golf, but I don't know very many. Of guy's guys that I know that golf, there's one really nice guy I know who does, and that somehow fits him. He's a computer guy. And there's one that's just too out of shape to do anything else, and you can be pretty out of shape and play golf if you use a cart. Neither of them are effeminate.
I don't think, actually, that these feelings are as unique as a person might think. At one point in time lawyers were associated with golf (not anymore) and some golfed as they felt they had to. This was particularly the case with new lawyers. I've known at least two new lawyers who golfed as they thought that's what lawyers did. Interestingly, of those two lawyers, I know a third person, a woman, who insists that one of them is "gay" just by her observations of him, even though he's been a married man for years. Maybe the golfing was too effeminizing.
In a weird sort of way, Donald Trump emphasized this a couple of years ago when he simply gushed over his probably totally fictional observations of the size of Arnold Palmer's penis.
Seriously?
Oddly enough, golf was definitely associated with lesbianism at one time. This was the case for decades, and in some ways it cuts against what I'm noting here. As a sport, it was a sport that women could participate in and do very well as professionals, and so perhaps, maybe, women who were sort of masculine in their internal inclinations participated at a higher rate that would have simply existed in the general population.
Oddly, golf at one time was highly segregated in every imaginable way. Blacks flat out weren't allowed on private golf courses, but often women weren't either. Lawsuits were required to end that. Wealth played a role to play on private courses, and still does. Indeed wealth played a role in keeping women off of golf courses, as business deals were conducted on them from which they were omitted, and that helped bring about the lawsuits later on.
All that probably offends my Irish egalitarianism.
I can't say much for golf.
Golf also seems to me to be the ultimate boring urban upper middle class excuse for a sport, at least at one time. Manly men might shoot hoops, or go play flag football, or something, but at one time towns and real estate developers put in golf courses as it was the default sport for aging white people.
Tennis is the other urban sport, or was. It's joined by basketball and pickle ball in that category, the latter being a newer sport whose existence I don't understand. The thing is, however, that to play any of those sports well, you really need to be in shape. The same kind of guy that can really drive a tennis ball over the net can drive a baseball right down the field at lethal speed.
Supposedly golf has declined in popularity in recent decades, and its notable that at the same time the demographics of the country are changing. Golf was heavily racist at one time and indeed it was more recently than a person might imagine, although there have been some really notable Hispanic and Black golfers. Golf is apparently of Scottish origin, where it would have been pretty darned manly, so its an import of the British Isles. People from other cultures don't really have any roots in it, and for that matter, lots of European Americans don't. Shooting was the sport for Germans, and competitive shooting, like polo, was a major military sport. Shooting was, and in fact is, a major civilian sport in many parts of the country. Basketball is an American sport, as is baseball, and both were played by rural and lower middle class demographics at first. Basketball is particularly interesting this way as it comes from farming country with bitter winters, so its a good indoor sport for a lot of pretty athletic people.
Football is actually of British origin, but the origin is from the British lower class and it reflects that origin to this day. Hunting is a male human universal, which recent anthropology suggest had more female participation in antiquity than previously imagined.
Gardening, hunting, shooting, walking, running and nearly anything just seems to have more merit that golf. But it hangs on in the minds of the elderly, a game of privilege from their youth.
So that a bloated old man with money would choose to wreck things for golf, makes sense. People tend to hang on to the era in which they were young, and the wealthy have more of an ability to do that than other people. The super wealthy have the ability to afflict that on everyone else.
