After decades bogged down in beige corduroys and buttoned-down cardigans, is golf finally turning hip?
Little more than a decade ago, the term ‘golf’ conjured up all sorts of images for the largely uninitiated, and few of them were good.
Pleated trousers, ill-fitting and seriously unfashionable visors, stuffy and pretentious clubhouses, overly tedious on-course etiquette, and so forth.
It’s the era of golf that I grew up with, so don’t take offence if you espoused the virtues of one or all the above – we were all guilty.
What made Happy Gilmore and Tin Cup – okay, I’m going back more than a decade here – so popular at the time was that the heroes of both were mavericks, guys who stuck their fingers up to the game’s traditions and who weren’t willing to trade who they were to fit in.
They were also comedies, and though comedies must be grounded in certain stereotypical or ideological truths, they have license to exaggerate. Even still, we all knew a Shooter McGavin-type and a David Simms-type, and we all knew that they would look at characters like Happy Gilmore and Tin Cup – or their real-life equivalents – as though they were little more than excrement on the soles of their shoes.
Yes, golf, as much fun as it was to play and watch, was simply not cool.
Even the arrival of Tiger Woods did little to change that. Sure, he brought more eyeballs, and more eyeballs meant more money as the corporate world tripped over themselves to hitch their trains to the Tiger wagon, but Woods had grown up with a military man as a father, was, by his own admission, a nerd at heart, and was shy to the extent that he named his yacht ‘Privacy.’
It wasn’t until the late-noughties scandal revealed his playboy side that Woods the man became as interesting as Woods the golfer, but it’s best not to delve too deeply into that.
Social media was barely a thing back then. Sure, many of us had Facebook or Twitter accounts, but we mostly used them to post pictures of our dinners and had yet to fully realise that their true intent was to dish out horrible insults to people whom you’d never have the courage to abuse face-to-face.
As such, even with his public shaming, wooden apology, and forced admission into therapy, Tiger probably got off lightly. I said I wasn’t going to delve into that, yet here I am…
Anyway, moving on. Golf? Still uncool.
But somewhere over the last 15 years, that all changed. Maybe it was COVID and the soft reopening that saw any sport played indoors or requiring you to get close enough to an opponent that you could smell their body odour remain out of bounds, while golf offered that competitive outlet and the thrill of the great outdoors.
Maybe it was Tiger’s own remarkable comeback from shame and injury, culminating in his Masters win in 2019.
Maybe it was the rise of YouTube golf and the fast-paced, zany on-course escapades of its pioneers, which tapped into a market for whom five- and six-hour marathons on a Sunday evening are tantamount to torture.
Or maybe it was the fact that the modern-day golf pro looks like a real athlete, whereas many of the stars of yesteryear, even at the height of their careers, could’ve passed for high-stool stooges. I’m fond of a bit of high-stool stooging myself, so that’s not meant as an insult either. To be fair, the baggy ‘90s attire didn’t help. Nowadays, you can practically count Jake Knapp’s abs through his skin-tight T-shirt while entire families could camp inside some of the older polos.
Anyway, now, we’ve got Gareth Bale, once the most expensive footballer in the world, retiring from the so-called beautiful game at 33, citing that the ability to play more golf was a considerable factor.
We’ve got LeBron James and Steph Curry – the two greatest basketball players of the post-Jordan era – posting about golf on social media. The former is a new recruit – and an apparent Tommy Fleetwood fan – while the latter is accomplished to the extent that he could team up with Bryson DeChambeau in a ‘Breaking 50’ attempt and arguably outshine the two-time U.S. Open champion.
We’ve got Carlos Alcaraz mimicking the golf swing using his tennis racquet after a semi-final win at Flushing Meadows because he knew Rory McIlroy was in the crowd, then talking at length about his ongoing battles with Andy Murray on the golf course in post-match interviews at Wimbledon.
We’ve got Niall Horan, who is understandably sick and tired of having beautiful women throwing themselves at his feet, opting to move into golf management instead.
And we’ve got Happy Gilmore 2. Against all odds, Scottie Scheffler – devout Christian, family man, and all-round good guy – was arguably the star of the show as he channelled his inner Leslie Nielsen and delivered top-notch deadpan humour, mocking his arrest in the process. The movie was truly awful, but it was worth it for Scheffler’s performance alone. And for John Daly’s, though you could argue that he wasn’t so much acting as being surreptitiously recorded on an average Tuesday…
And Shooter McGavin was back, but this time, as one of the heroes. That actor Christopher McDonald has spent most of the last 29 years joyously playing up to the ‘Shooter’ role in everyday life might’ve been a factor here, but even still, the stuffy, buttoned-down pro was now portrayed as a wacky man of the hour.
Dare I say it? Dare I even whisper it? Has golf now become cool?
They say that if you wait long enough, fashion comes full circle – my refusal to give up on the bootcut jeans which were all the rage in my youth is paying dividends now – but if golf has never been fashionable, how can it rotate back into fashion?
Well, somehow, it has.
Once upon a time, the only grooves being talked about in golf were the ones on wedges – now, the sport itself is groovy.
Or have I just made it uncool again by using the word ‘groovy?’
