A Queer Old Game

[andy steel 0]

Enough with Rangers based navel gazing! Here's some golf based navel gazing.

 

Football is a funny old game, said Saint and Greavsie in their inexplicably popular lunchtime show of the 1980's. I guess it showed how stuck in its ways Football Focus had become that such a dismally unfunny programme could actually be made, let alone become popular. At least it allowed Jimmy Greaves some later life rehabilitation, which given his abilities (before my time, I admit) and drink troubles counts for something. Takes a lot to justify inflicting Ian St. John on the nation, though.

 

There's never been any accounting for football with logic, though. Or sport, in general. As the weekend draws to a close, the annual circus that is The Masters adorns our screens, the stunning flora of Georgia only matched by the stunning crassness of a set up which reduces golf to little more than hit and hope, a well paid version of the fabulous crazy golf course next to the ferry port at Brodick. One of the holes features a miniature version of the Forth Rail Bridge - Brodick, that is, not Augusta.

 

Some may see this assertion as heresy, but it's ever harder to defend The Masters as anything but golf for people who don't get golf. Galleries made up of a-whoopin' and a -hollerin' Bubba lardos, about as unreflective of golf's horribly overdue racial diversity as you can get, greens which appear to be devoid of grass, golf's risk-and-reward ethos eliminated and replaced by pure luck: The Masters isn't golf, it's stick and ball based comedy.

 

Such an opinion, alas, found me in the company of the awful Peter Alliss, about whom I feel bad being mean since he plainly is not long for this world. I won't miss his commentary, though, which is ever more a talking obituary column and less about the golf. Alliss has dared incur the wrath of Augusta's organisers by publicly, on air, calling out their tournament for the shambles that it is: 'Bobby Jones never played golf like this', he said this evening, and he was right: you probably couldn't have fitted Bubba Watson's ludicrously oversized driver into Jones' golf bag.

 

How I would have loved to be good enough to get an invite! I would be torn between declining on the grounds that it isn't real golf and that to endorse such a bastion of sexism and racism is unethical, or turning up in full clown outfit, with wig, squirting flower in lapel and sporting giant shoes. The only worry is that, in the world of pro golf, such attire might not be thought unusual. I do often think, sardonic smile on chubby face, how Spiers can reconcile his decades long attendance at Augusta with his crusade on diversity in Scotland. Or how the BBC as a body justifies it. Or their coverage of our Open. However, golf is changing, and broadcasters no longer need be embarrassed to cover it. They can move on, so can golf. Be nice if they extended the same courtesy to us, but no matter.

 

I fear to keep such conservative company as Peter Alliss, who is out there in the land where that Inverdale oaf is acceptable. Queer bedfellows, indeed. I am far more comfortable cuddling in with someone like Peter Tatchell, of Outrage, or gay rights group Stonewall. Like Nil by Mouth on golf, such people have been loud in their denunciation of football as a hotbed of homophobia, but although they have my every sympathy in their general aims, when it comes to football I just can't see it. Football must be the least macho sport around, replete with much mano-a-mano hugging, shorts which are again, after two decades of repressed, baggy shorts, showing signs of becoming short shorts again, more unconvincing acting than Rory McIlroy in that Santander ad (once more I wonder how some ad executives both get and keep their jobs) and - the final clincher, this - people who are always threatening violence but who never, ever actually throw a punch.

 

Footballers are the weediest bunch ever. Why the game gets a homophobic name is beyond me: if we're going to accept 1970's stereotypes of homosexuality, you'd have to chalk up fitba as the game of Queens, on the pitch at least. I suppose it's like all those rockers who used to worship Freddy Mercury without either knowing or turning a hair about his rampant queer identity.

 

Well, I can't work out people who want to make us all different anyway. Gay or straight, most of us are boring, dull people who don't differ all that much - work, sleep, work, shopping, complain, work and so on. Fetishists, those are the freaks we should be marginalizing, like fans of rubber or nihilist East Fife fans. The half-cut beer bellies who are presently intoning 'Kooooooch' in order to worship a lanky, inoffensive golfer aren't doing any more harm than some half-cut Weegie twat calling a footballer 'a big poofy bastart' because he shirked a tackle. But the lads in Georgia sound like wallopers, and so do unthinking or conscious homophobes at football games.

 

It certainly doesn't take a PC totem like Spiers or Cosgrove, working to a highly selective agenda of inclusivity, to realise that this ain't the 70's, and that neither tartan flares on the golf course nor nasty jibes about what other people get up to in the bedroom are really on. Anyway, I'd bet that the idea that gay people indulge in a non-stop festival of sweaty shagging is as far from the mark as the idea that I, married 15 years, am doing likewise with my missus. Like I say, work, sleep, and so on is much the same regardless.

 

But one of these days, like Augusta, we in Scotland will catch up with the rest of the world. Even St Andrews allows women in to the clubhouse now! Everyone, everywhere is in a flux, a process of change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, like in Ukraine. This idea that of the entire globe, only Rangers FC can never change has to be consigned to the bin, whether it comes from LUMP fundmentalists within our own support or everyone else who are ironically more puritan in their distaste of us than we, with our imaginary Calvinist identity, could ever be: look at the effort they have put in to demonising us over the last few years! We can only dream of such ideologically driven energy.

 

Here's to the golf, anyway. No doubt I will watch again next year, as Westwood demonstrates that not being able to putt means you'll never win a biggie, and that golf should not really be allowed away from Scottish links. Perhaps it will help me forget another week of enormous letdown brought on by eleven men in shorts. It's a queer old game, right enough.

Edited February 19, 2017 by andy steel
typos, grammar, content.

[The Real PapaBear 0]

when you are good, Mr Steel, you are very, very good indeed.

A beguiling mix of Hugh Macilveney, Ed Mcbain and Owen Jones.

[andy steel 0]

Very kind, RPB. I need to look up the last of those, mind you.

 

OP now edited to make some kind of sense - posted in wrong forum last night, sorry bout that.

[Juancornetto 1]

when you are good, Mr Steel, you are very, very good indeed.

A beguiling mix of Hugh Macilveney, Ed Mcbain and Owen Jones.

 

High praise indeed, apart from the Owen Jones part (detestable little gauche windbag)