The great misunderstanding in the Chris Minns v golf debate

The great misunderstanding around Chris Minns-versus-golf is the idea that, by chopping the Moore Park course in half, the NSW premier is depriving golfers of their enjoyment. Instead, he is depriving them of their misery, which risks a much stronger reaction.

Moore Park golfer Ed Lawson. Nine holes of the golf course will be converted into a public park.Credit: Jessica Hromas

Much of the brouhaha about the state government’s announced plan to convert half of the inner-city course into public parkland is unaware of this unspeakable truth. The non-golfing community would have a better grasp of the issues if they knew that golf is not enjoyable and that a golf course is not a place where people go to celebrate their good fortune, but rather where they go to bury their torments.

Mark Twain called the game “a good walk spoiled”. Today’s Twain, Larry David, explains on Curb Your Enthusiasm why he’s finally quitting golf after years of agony: “Meh. I just don’t like it.”

The former Test cricketer Trevor Chappell was a devoted B-grader, reaping the benefits of retirement with as much golf as he could crave, until the truth struck him: “Every time I play, it gives me the shits.” He has been good to his resolution, never picking up a club again.

The majority of golfers, at Moore Park and elsewhere, are not out there ruining the environment with chemical fertilisers, cutting down (or whacking their clubs against) native flora, scaring off the fauna, hogging what should be public space, selfishly breathing the city’s lungs by virtue of paid access, to have fun. They are in golf hell. But a government threatening to reduce their suffering is not a relief. It’s an assault. Premier Minns, Sydney Mayor Clover Moore and their many supporters might consider this as they wade into a battle they don’t understand.

NSW Premier Chris Minns and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore are wading into a battle they don’t understand.Credit: Jessica Hromas

Golfers are not normal sportspeople or hobbyists. They are victims of a complex masochistic compulsion to repeat a four-to-five-hour trial of character, making their unhappy way towards a consoling drink in the clubhouse where they can moan at the injustice of it all. And that’s on a good day. Sound like fun? Only if you don’t do it.

For the wealthy who can afford membership of inner-east clubs like Royal Sydney, the ordeal of golf is compounded by the shame of paying so dearly for it.Credit:

For the wealthy who can afford membership of inner-east clubs like The Australian, The Lakes and Royal Sydney, the ordeal is compounded by the shame of paying so dearly for it. If you play one round of golf a week at such courses for, say, six years, every losing battle with your inadequacy has cost you more than $200, comprising annual membership dues, competition fees, and a sign-on that costs more than a new car and is even longer to wait for.

This sounds less like fun than a bruising bout with your own self-indulgence. Over those six years, you have spent something like $60,000 on a mania that you can no sooner help than a dog returning to its own vomit. On false hope. On the futility of lessons that only made you worse. On your body’s capitulation to nature and age. On the treacherous falsity of the promise that the more you practise, the better you get. On the revelation, for some, that their long-time friend and playing partner is not only a bore and an idiot, but, most disturbingly, a cheat. On discovering your unpalatable selfishness – you could have given that money to ending someone else’s wretchedness rather than increasing your own. And that’s on a good day.

Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit:

Then there are those so passionate about their golf club that they volunteer for the committee. When they finish their game, their pain has only just begun. Now they have to deal with club politics, where the megalomania and double-dealing put mere corporate and community conflict in the shade. One Sydney club was known as “Belfast” for its infighting (putting up with off-colour jokes is another of the trials). And that’s on a good day.

Moore Park, a low-fee public course with working-class members who appreciate the difference between “privilege” and “a privilege”, is being unfairly penalised. Moore Park members are already bombarded by thousands of social visitors who wander the course like Brown’s cows, hitting the wrong ball, losing their way and stopping for a chat, leaving bunkers unraked and pitch marks unrepaired, and generally keeping everyone out in the boiling sun, the scouring wind and the horizontal rain for double the time. As if golf weren’t painful enough! To halve this space and ask players to walk around their nine holes twice is to double their agony.

The premier might compare the health benefits of public parkland with those of golf. By providing more space for dog-walkers, picnickers, young parents and empty-nesters, so they can get more of the fresh air that has been stolen from them by greedy developers, is all very well for physically active people who are already happy to be outdoors.

On the other hand, to cut a golf course is only deepening the unhappiness of a chronically unhappy cohort who somehow come home from their game having left their unhappiness in the bottom of a pond or the long grass. The first mental health benefit of golf is that it gives golfers somewhere to dredge up all their despair and then somewhere to leave it behind them.

Sure, it’s not all misery. Golf does occasionally repay all the hardship with one moment of bliss, so rare that it stands out like a spring in a desert. A perfectly struck iron, a chip that defies the laws of physics and despair to snake its way into the cup. Human nature is truly perverse: the golfer leaves all the grief behind and brings home this one joy, this reason to get out of bed tomorrow and come back for more.

Minns ought to know one thing about this single golden moment of redemption: it might not happen until the back nine holes. Lose the back nine, you lose half a chance at hope.

Every time golf comes under this uncomfortable spotlight, I think of my friend JF, who plays twice a week off the maximum handicap, meaning he never plays off it. Put another way, JF can only dream of being as poor as a golfer can be judged to be. Not even on a good day.

Whether before or after a round, you find JF muttering about this “c--- of a game” and the “complete f---wit” of a person he is to keep playing it. But we both know, and the premier should know too, that without his 18-hole ritual of martyrdom, JF’s life would barely be worth living. He doesn’t know why he keeps doing it, but his survival instinct tells him that if he didn’t, he’d be much worse off. He’d have nowhere to leave his planet-sized suffering, and no tiny shatterproof joy to bring home. To the premier I would say, if you deprive people of their happiness, you invite a backlash. But if you deprive them of their misery, you invite a popular uprising.

Malcolm Knox is an author and a regular columnist.