Golf Soccer is fashionable, and almost everyone has at least a passing interest in it; tennis has the whole country becoming fans for precisely two weeks during Wimbledon fortnight and uninteresting for the rest of the year. But golf is quite different. People either love it obsessively or ignore it totally. Opinions veer off sharply to one side or the other, like the drives of most amateur golfers. England gave the world many team sports: in increasing order of violence, cricket, soccer, football hooliganism, and rugby. But Scotland gave the world golf. Always with an eye on economy, they developed a ball sport that required the minimum of equipment: a stick. Equipment has become more sophisticated and costs a bit more nowadays, but players still use just the one glove. This July, the Open Championship again brings the world's best golfers to Britain, to the Royal Birkdale course. And watching them will be some of the world's worst. They will be in the expensive corporate chalets costing over £300 per person per day, with champagne included of course. Golf is not dramatic enough to make good television. Perhaps because it requires much solitary practice to become skilled, the great players are rarely lively characters. British golfers (Nick Faldo, Colin Montgomerie, Ian Woosnam) have had many successes in the last few years in the major competitions, yet our less successful tennis players, cricket and soccer teams get much more attention. Golf can be a dreadfully frustrating way of spending a weekend afternoon; it was once famously described by the writer Bernard Shaw as a 'good walk spoiled'. So why do 1,800 clubs have 700,000 members in Britain? Golf may be a poor way of enjoying the countryside - unless you have a botanical interest in bracken and deep undergrowth - but it is great for making contacts and maintaining status. The golfer of our imagination is still a middle-aged man, probably a self-made businessman, for whom the round is an open-air business meeting. Deals can be made, ideas discussed, and everything sealed informally with a drink at the 'Nineteenth', the club bar. (The Scottish roots show again. Motor racing drivers celebrate wins with champagne, soccer players spoil their training with too much lager, rugby players swill bitter, but among sportsmen only golfers drink whisky.) Despite this image, golf is not necessarily an expensive sport. Municipal courses charge non-members as little as £5 for a round, though more prestigious courses would be two to three times as much. Getting into the local golf club, as in most countries, can be a good way of 'making it', though club politics can be complex. Here are some golf images and cliches to know about. Dress sense Golf is a game of wonderful scenery and dreadful dress sense. We put golfers in the same sartorial bracket as American tourists, with the same pastel-coloured tops and garish patterned trousers. No wonder there are so few world-class French or Italian golfers. And so many world-class Americans. Jargon A constant source of wry eyebrow-raising among non-golfers. Golf jargon comes in two types. The first is of nonsense words utterly incomprehensible to the layman: 'mashie', 'niblick'. The second are ones which make sense in specific non-golf circumstances ('iron', 'wood' etc.) but which sound bizarre collected together. A 'bunker' is where you keep your coal. A 'slice' (hitting the ball badly so it veers off right) is a piece of cake. A 'bogey' (scoring one worse than average at a hole) is the word a child uses for a piece of nasal mucus. A real golfer would never find any of this remotely funny, of course. Caddies The image in our mind of the typical caddie is a small, wiry old Scot. A man of few words, spoken in a thick Scottish accent, a typical comment to you might be something like'You want a six iron from here. In '66 I caddied for Nicklaus. He holed from here with a six iron'. However, he only says this after you have used an eight iron, and ended up in the lake. St Andrews The Home of Golf, on the east coast of Scotland. The first written mention of golf is from 1457, when King James II of Scotland banned it as it was interfering with his subjects' archery practice. Not until 98 years later do we have the first record of an actual game at St Andrews, which shows the game has always been slow. James's grandson James IV started off trying to ban golf but set a trend by turning from critic into fanatic, becoming converted to the game. In 1834 the club was awarded royal patronage, becoming the 'Royal and Ancient'. In 1897 it set the first uniform rules of the game and is still the governing authority for all countries except the US, Canada and Mexico, where different rules on acceptable trouser patterns apply. Golfing types There are, broadly speaking, the same range of golfing types as in any other amateur sport. There is the fanatic, who has all the latest equipment, reads all the magazines, can hold forth for hours on the difference between rival firms' products, and is quite useless. There is the natural sportsman, probably excellent at rugby or cricket, who plays twice a year with half a set of jumble-sale clubs, beats everyone, and buys the first round the bar. There is the chap there for his image - in this case, for business contacts. And there is the Club Official, rarely seen playing but always at the club, checking that everyone is obeying the rules. Golf widows A common image, of the woman whose husband spends all his time at the golf club. Golf often separates middle-aged, affluent couples. Their children have now left home, and if it weren't for the golf, man and wife would now spend evenings and weekends in each other's company. So golf has affected the divorce rate a great deal. It has kept it down.

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