By Joe Queenan
Illustration By Bruce McCall
October 2007
In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd raked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the coals for talking about her hook while the situation was deteriorating in Iraq. Simultaneously, corporate raider Carl Icahn said of CEOs who play golf: "These guys would rather play golf, slap each other on the back. I want a guy running a company who sits in his tub at night thinking about the challenges he faces. The guy who can't let it go. The focused guy."
Perhaps emboldened by so much blood in the water, deposed AIG chairman and tennis aficionado Hank Greenberg announced that he, too, despises golf, sneering, "A lot of people like to get away from their work. You have to wonder whether they like what they're doing." The coup de grâce in this unexpected onslaught was delivered when an anonymous portfolio manager blasted Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne for spending too much time playing golf while his firm was reporting dismal earnings and a pair of his firm's hedge funds were imploding.
Investors will note that this barrage of unoccasioned venom spilled forth in the month leading up to Wall Street's mid-summer swoon, when the Dow lost almost 5 percent of its value in a week. Use of this oracular device could stand investors in good stead the next time the market gets a bit frothy: Wait until people start teeing off on CEOs who play golf, and then short everything.
There is, and always has been, a communal lapse of sanity in this otherwise logical nation when it comes to golf (see Golf Digest's ranking of the golfers on Wall Street). Trading on a festering mythology that dates to the Great Depression -- now roughly 70 years behind us -- detractors refer to the sport as if it were some esoteric rite like cat worship or the midnight sacrifice of newborn albino pheasants to Huaxtuphal, god of mirth, as if playing 18 holes were some weird ritual practiced exclusively by furtive members of a secret society who carry divining rods and wear ornate headdresses and communicate through Esperanto hand signals and write in hieroglyphics, when in fact it is a sport closely associated with that dapper Keystone State septuagenarian who has been hawking antifreeze for decades. Moreover, it is a sport whose appeal is by no means confined to a single class: All of us know salesmen and bartenders and short-order cooks and cops who play golf. Some of us even are salesmen and bartenders and short-order cooks and cops who play the game.
Golfers in my town include a retired surveyor, a graphic designer, an auto-parts rep, a magazine editor, the owner of the local diner, and my postman. Does anyone ever suggest that the eatery's esteemed souvlaki has dipped in quality because the owner is spending too much time playing golf? Would anyone suggest that the margaritas at the local tavern have lost their bite because the bartender spends too much time working on his short game? Would anyone dream of complaining that a designer selected the wrong font size and an inappropriate typeface because he was spending too much time working on that hitch in his swing? That is, anyone in his right mind?
The golf-loathing public is divided into three broad groups: Nongolfers like Icahn who deride the sport as the Xanaduan domain of stogie-chomping plutocrats; occasional golfers who resent those who get to play more frequently, or more competently, or who play incompetently but get to do it on better courses than their critics; and journalists, who can never resist a chance for a cheap laugh. Even journalists who play golf will take a shot at fat-cat golfers, just as journalists who are boring will mock accountants; it's the sort of faux populist rabble-rousing-by-numbers the man in the street loves. Mind you, the man in the street doesn't actually want to see the rabble roused; if the rabble ever got roused, most men would get in off the street.
- Text Size:
- Small Text
- Medium Text
- Large Text
