Commentary

Fore!

May 28, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The great game of golf, while sometimes maligned by its mockers, has changed in one important aspect over the years. Effectively eliminating the part of golfing that everyone could agree is a virtue – the 18-hole walk, has been unofficially dropped in favour of the waistline – expanding use of golf carts.

My father would have disapproved. He was a great, non-professional golfer, an amateur yet, with a sturdy row of trophies for each of his four or five holes-in-one and for winning tournaments over his years of golfing.

If he were honest, he would have admitted being somewhat disappointed that I, his only child, as it happened, was born a girl and was therefore not really qualified to go out with him and learn to play golf.

I preferred horses anyway.

There were fewer ladies playing then than there are now by a long shot. A theory, to be eventually debunked, that a woman’s shape, the curves of the front of her body, would interfere with a successful golf swing that entails the stick and the arms making a wide swoop across the front of the golfer’s body. If you see what I mean.

Once in a while, but not often for sure, my mother and I would trail along with my father while he played the 18 holes, if he was not otherwise engaged with fellow golfers. There had been fleeting attempts for my father to teach my mother to golf, but whether her frontal appendages lived up to being predictable obstacles or it was similar to the erstwhile saying about husbands and the perils of trying to teach their wives to drive, I am not sure.

The lessons did quietly end, though, to a whispered sigh of relief on all our parts, I think.

Nevertheless, there are great lessons to be learned on a golf course beyond the skills of a stick connecting successfully with a small ball as few times as possible to sink it into a small flagged hole.

Good manners, this above all. It is hoped that the protocol of silence is still strict, while a shot launches that ball toward a target that might be 100 yards or more away or just a few feet, a careful tap to knock that little ball into that hole.

At one time, good manners mattered at all times, in conversation and commentary, whether praising or commiserating with success or bad luck. As life lessons, even people who have never stood upon the perfectly groomed “green” where finesse is all and the tiniest move, breeze or cough can make or break a moment of intense drama, might still use the language of golf.

How to deal with and beat frustration is an ongoing lesson to any golfer, for the courses are a life’s worth of traps, and they are called that: sand trap, water hazard, trees and wooded areas.

So, inventiveness is learned from how to get around or blast one’s way out of the traps with a mighty slash and swing that can follow the golfer into the business world. Indeed, a great deal of business is conducted on golf courses, which makes sense in so many ways.

Golf is played outside, albeit in a somewhat forced place of nature, where there will still be wild animals. Which animals depend on location, but only in indoor, artificial, digital golf replication will there be no animals.

We are better off outside in nature, where the air is cleaner, the greenery is soothing, and the game itself lends an ease that combines with the emotions of playing along with those frustrations and challenges of the traps. Life encapsulated, one might say, an open book for discourse.

Of course, there is a history back to the 15th Century on the East Coast of Scotland, near Edinburgh, when a game of hitting pebbles with bent sticks over sand dunes evolved into what golf is today. So popular was golf that, even though the country was under attack, men were neglecting their military training to play it. This was such a problem that in 1457, the parliament of King James II banned the sport.

Naturally, people ignored the ban, but not until 1502 did the game gain the royal seal of approval when King James IV of Scotland (1473 -1513) became the world’s first golfing monarch.

A litany of how golf spread throughout Europe notes that in the 1600s, Mary Queen of Scots introduced the game to France. The term caddie comes from her French military aides, known as cadets, according ot Historic UK.

There was a moment when my father, observing my own slim build, did take me to a golf driving range with the idea I might take up the family passion. All he could do was laugh. I did develop a reasonable swing, being built for it, but there was no way for me to learn that particular shake of one’s bottom that did not completely break him up.

He promised he loved me anyway and was sure that he would be able to teach me to drive a car.

Golf, thy name is subtlety.

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