Extincting Golf and Football, American Style

THE TWIN TOWERS of American macho sport, golf, and non-soccer American football, are in big trouble. The former involves too few participants, the latter, too many. In the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies I played golf on a nice public course for a buck fifty a day, holes unlimited, a thirty dollar bag of serviceable clubs, walk and carry, no ride. Golf carts are for wimps. One day I played twenty seven holes, but I was fifteen years old, and didn't know any better. I'm glad I don't play now. If I did, I would be bankrupt, washing dishes in the clubhouse kitchen between rounds, living on Obamacare and Mecicaid. Too expensive, too time consuming. One million people give up golf every year in the United States alone. At the current rate, all golf courses will soon be overrun with weeds, devolving back into the wilderness whence they came. Rich white men are giving up the game; women, children, and minorities hardly ever even got started. Titanium golf clubs, longer and longer courses, ever more costly to maintain, monsters requiring constant nourishment, playable only by an elite few super athletes. Long gone are the halycon days of Scottish cow pastures of rough and fun, and wooden clubs with reasonable, non explosive performance specs. It turns out that high tech is a double edged sword, which can and does emasculate that which it is intnded to serve and improve. Meanwhile, American football once upon a time consisted of blocking and tackling; now, it consists of something violent called "hitting". Hitting means to main. And why not? what, other than main, do we do anywhere else in our depraved culture of violence and pain, where pain and death are televised blood sports, taking us far away from ourselves into a land of escape from our painful, super competitive, unfulfilling lives. When a sufficient number of should be perfectly healthy middle aged men are seen tottering down our streets, oblivious to their surroundings, maybe we will take notice, and turn our attention towards those who suffer, and away from the cause of the suffering. We will, but only because we will have no other choice. I love golf and football, always have, always will. What telling what I love is not the same thing as telling the truth about what I love. The truth is, two of our most popular American pastimes are in dire trouble, because of the direction they have chosen to take, probably will not long endure, and probably shouldn't, at least not in their present, perverted forms. They are directly derived from our current culture of extremes and excess; which, were it a horse, would long ago have been put out of its mmisery with an expedient bullet to the brain.