Golf

proletariat golf

Comrades at  New York Times can no longer even write human interest stories without incorporating little digs at "Corporate America."  Take More Americans Are Giving Up Golf , written by Paul Vitello.  “ Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession. ... a sport of long-term investors — both those who buy the expensive equipment and those who build the princely estates on which it is played — has always seemed to exist in a world above the fray of shifting demographics. “No time. Two jobs. Real wages not going up. Pensions going away. Corporate cutbacks in country club memberships ” I've played golf with hundreds of  people, and the great majority were school teachers, salesman, tradesmen, and just average Joe's.  I quit golf when I got into sailing, which I'll posit ranks a little under Polo as a sport associated with corporate success, even though my used Cal 25 cost less than a new car.  More to the point, by making the statements Vitello betrays a mindset that I've come to expect from the Times (Disclosure).   Besides, some of his reasoning is counterintuitive.  I have no prollem believing, for instance, that the Donahue generation have guilt about taking family time for selfish indulgence, along with guilt about everything else, but then we learn that there are too many golf courses.  That's right, empty fairways. And that a round typically takes four hours!  Are you kidding me?  When I played, unless you had a 6 AM tee-off time, a round of golf required an 8 hour time investment, and that was if you didn't find yourself behind four women. My guess is that reasons for any golfing decline are the same reasons we are suffering from a national vitamin D deficiency - we spend more time indoors - on the computer, and watching Tiger Wood on our 52" plasmas. Vitello admits as much in his notation that there has been a general decline in all outdoor leisure sports, so what is he up to?  Here's what I think.  The Times is beginning their campaign to condition us to accept President Obama's (shiver) move to confiscate all the wasted golf course proppity to build homes for America's suffering underclasses.  That's what I think.