I know a little about golf.
I started playing at the game before I started school and did a couple of years' apprenticeship where I accompanied my father onto the course and he'd let me play a hole or two. The first full round I played on a grown-up golf course was in Augusta, Ga., (no, it wasn't that course) when I was 7 or 8.
Unless you have your name on your bag, it's highly unlikely you've played more golf than me. A few years ago, when my responsibilities around this place consisted almost entirely of writing stuff, I posted about 200 rounds per year toward my handicap index. I've cut back to a couple of rounds a week, but in the past decade I've easily played 1,000 rounds of golf.
I'm what really good players call a "nice little player." I have four holes in one in my golf career, one in a tournament and one on a par four that was playing over 300 yards long. I'm one those guys who has a $375 shaft in his driver; whose irons have been tweaked two degrees strong (to complement the 50-degree pitching wedge I consider standard--I consider the club with "PW" stamped on the sole to be a nine iron) and tipped half an inch.
If you don't understand that last part, that's my point. The few of you who do are probably as degenerate as I am.
It's nothing to be proud of; being good at golf is nothing more than a sign of a misspent youth. I agree with Bobby Jones and Jack Nicklaus that the average able-bodied person, given decent instruction and a reasonable commitment to the game, could eventually play well. I just chose to spend a lot of my time chasing a little white ball in a pasture rather than studying for the SATs or learning to play piano.
I've written about some of my misgivings with country club culture in this space. All this is to say I am qualified to make the following statement:
You never drive a golf cart on a green.
And yet a shocking video emerged last week of President Donald J. Trump doing just that. It was over the weekend at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. where they're going to play the women's U.S. Open next month. And apparently he's also done so on other courses he owns. The Washington Post--yes, I know, fake news--quoted a former member of Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., as saying Trump regularly drove on the greens there.
Seriously, this is the most disturbing thing (we know of) Trump has done since those awful comments he made to Billy Bush back in 2005. Maybe it's even worse, because even though those comments were horrible and rude, some men talk like that sometimes. (Though most are inchoate men of about 14 years old who've never had any real life experience with women. Contrary to what Trump's apologists would tell you, decent men do not say such things.)
But you simply don't drive a golf cart onto a green. Ever.
If you play golf, you know that. If you play golf and this doesn't seem like a big deal to you, maybe you should check your tribalism for a moment. This is the sort of stunt the nouveau-riche vulgarian played by Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack would pull. If you think you're all right with it, imagine your daughter or son doing it.
Now some of you who don't play or care about golf are thinking that this isn't a big deal. "So what?" you say, "Trump owns this course, he can drive on his greens if he wants."
I suppose he's got the right to do that. You can leave your Beretta DT 11 shotgun out in the rain too, if you want to; you can drive your 1963 Corvette Stingray Split Window coupe without oil. If you're rich enough and you don't care about the damage you do, you can trash anything. As lots of spoiled athletes and rock stars have found out, you can be as destructively self-indulgent as you want for precisely as long as the money holds out.
Hell, some of you believe it's all right to beat your animals.
I know few of us are willing to let our obsessions get in the way of the facts, but this is incontrovertible evidence of our president's messed-uppedness. You might have gone along with Trump's denial that he was making fun of a disabled reporter back during the campaign, you might even have bought into Rudy Giuliani's suggestion that everyone who's anyone gets a little action on the side now and then, you might even believe that the rich are different than you and me and that famous alpha males are entitled to whatever they can grab. But how can someone possibly defend this?
You think this isn't serious? Well, maybe the GOP's war on average folk deserves our attention more, but maybe not. Because this is evidence of a genuinely broken personality.
Trump purports to love golf. And while we can be concerned about the amount of golf he plays as president, and the expense his outings incur, his obvious obsession with the game has always been a humanizing factor. He seems like a lot of duffers--probably not as good as he pretends but capable of pulling off the occasional great shot. His delight in golf suggests he is capable of caring about things other than money and power.
This ruins that. It reveals Trump's lack of respect for the game, its values and traditions. You can't love what you don't respect. For Trump, golf is just another way to advertise his specialness--his belief that he's above all rules, laws and simple customs.
Sad.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 06/27/2017