The Ben Trovato (mis)Guide to Golf

By Ben Trovato

An estimated 60 million people around the world play golf regularly. Ben Trovato is not one of them. However, he saw this more of an asset than a liability when it came to writing a book about the sport. Trovato sets out to open the untrained eye to the rules, protocols and traditions of what he believes can and should become a blood sport. The (mis)Guide to Golf is an invaluable tool in helping people to decide whether to start, continue or give up playing altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Trovato
• Release date: Dec 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310383656

Ben Trovato

Ben Trovato has been keeping the nation amused and outraged since 2001 when he published his first book, The Ben Trovato Files, long-listed for the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. He was also nominated for a Safta award for writing on the satirical television show ZA News: Puppet Nation. He lives alone with two regrets and a hangover.

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THE BEN TROVATO (mis)GUIDE TO GOLF

By Ben Trovato

Copyright 2014 Ben Trovato

Smashwords Edition

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Introduction

There are increasingly few things in this life that make it worth living. Crispy fried chicken is one. Golf is another. Eating crispy fried chicken while playing golf is about the closest that most of us will ever come to achieving true happiness.

Eating crispy chicken on your own will satisfy your hunger, but once you have snapped the furcula and made your sad little wish, you will still feel that something is missing.

You will experience that same feeling of emptiness if you play a round of golf on your own. This is because golf, like eating crispy fried chicken, is not meant to be done on your own. It is meant to be done with a partner, preferably one to whom you are not married.

If you had to eat crispy chicken with your wife, she would end up saying: For God’s sake use a serviette and not your sleeve the way you eat makes me nauseous didn’t your mother teach you any manners.

If you had to play golf with your wife, she would end up saying: You told me to hit it like that it’s your fault my ball is lost I want to take that shot over this time I’m doing it my way.

But if you had to eat chicken or play golf with a beautiful stranger, she would tell you how sexy you looked with grease dripping off your chin, or how she loved the way your butt wobbled every time you tried to get your ball out of the bunker.

This is why, when my publisher approached me with the idea of writing a guide to the perfidious world of golf, I jumped at it. Well, to be honest, and I think honesty is vital when it comes to golf, I jumped sideways and then backed away in a crab-like fashion.

Golfers are serious about their sport, whereas chickens are not at all picky when it comes to who eats them. Just as long as somebody does. No chicken wants to be the last one left on the rack with a spit up its bum when the lights go off.

Chickens do not take you to court. They do not get restraining orders against you, nor do they send the cock around to beat the living daylights out of you if you happen to inadvertently cast aspersions on their character, let alone their sexuality. Not that any normal person can tell the sex of a chicken, or would even want to, for that matter.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I am not one of those blindly pro-chicken people. Chickens have their faults, too. If religious fundamentalists had to take me hostage and force me to choose between golf and crispy fried chicken, I would take golf without giving it a second thought.

This is because golf is the sport of kings. Not horse racing. Do you see golfers defecating on the course? Do you see golfers whipping each other to play faster? Do you see golfers breaking an ankle and being shot in the head right there in front of the crowd? Sure, these things do happen, but nowhere nearly as often as they do in horse racing. And hardly ever at The Links at Fancourt.

Apart from its connection with crispy fried chicken, golf is oddly similar to global terrorism in that no person of sound mind quite understands why it takes place.

To be frank, it is usually the women who find it difficult to understand. A wife in the West Bank who wakes up to her husband strapping a kilogram of Semtex to his waist feels the same way that a wife in Constantia feels waking up to her husband strapping one glove to his left hand. Whether she loses him for the weekend or for the rest of her life is irrelevant. The fact remains that he has chosen to do something that does not include her. This is particularly galling when there are gutters to be cleaned or camels to be fed.

I am not really in a position to speak for suicide bombers, but when it comes to golf, it is important to remember that the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews laid down the rules long before you were married. This is not something that is open to interpretation and you need to make your wife understand that.

Writing this book was not easy. Golf is a strangely primal animal, yet one that is possessed of infinitely utopian ideals. To understand its pulsating, duplicitous heart means dressing like Arthur Dent and thinking like Winston Smith.

Purists may find the odd flaw in this biopsy, but for the rest of you, I hope there is something in here that helps you reduce your handicap and stay out of jail.

Ben Trovato

A Brief History of Golf

It was on a Tuesday afternoon around 4pm that an apelike creature lurched into a clearing in a forest just outside where Kampala is today, and realised that the best way to stop his knuckles from dragging on the ground was to stand upright.

It took some time for Homo Erectus to get used to his new position, but it wasn’t long before he discovered that one of the reasons he had evolved was so that he could hit things.

Over the next million or so years, our species went from hitting small animals and sometimes even rocks and trees just for the hell of it, to hitting golf balls and sometimes even their wives and children just for the hell of it.

It is not always easy to tell the difference between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis.

The Scottish like to claim credit for inventing golf in much the same way that they like to claim credit for inventing whisky. You can hardly blame them. No nation wants to be remembered for nothing else but eating sheep guts, creating a musical instrument from hell, inventing skirts for men and making a sport out of staggering about a field in driving rain trying to toss a tree trunk further than three metres.

Golf and whisky give the Scots a cachet they probably don’t deserve, especially when you consider that if it were not for Mel Gibson, England would still rule Scotland today.

There is a stained-glass window in Gloucester Cathedral that illustrates scenes from the Battle of Crecy in France. No, of course I haven’t been there. I am looking at a picture of it in this book on golf that is lying open on my desk.

In one frame, a Frenchman can be seen preparing to strike a ball. The illustration goes back to around 1350, a time when the medieval English themselves were playing a game called cambuca, which is not to be confused with sambuca, the main component of a highly inflammable game enjoyed by fun-loving youngsters in pubs around the Commonwealth. The game is won by the person who is granted the highest bail. The losers go to hospital to have bits of their bums grafted to where their lips once were.

As in most things, the Romans had the jump on everyone else when it came to frivolous pursuits, starting with Emperor Nero fiddling with himself while Rome burned. Today, tourists can still be heard describing Italians as wankers when they go to Milan to have their bags snatched by true professionals.

While the English thought they were onto a good thing with cambuca, the Romans had already been playing paganica for some time. The only difference between the two games was that paganica was played with a ball fashioned from leather and feathers, while in cambuca the ball was made of wood. The difference between English and Italian balls can still be seen during times of war.

The Flemish played a similar game called chole, but nobody took much notice. Very few people knew where the Flemish came from or even what the hell kind of stupid language they were talking.

The game is still played in southern Belgium, although no independent verification could be obtained. If anyone ever had to find Belgium, and then, by a remarkable stroke of luck stumble upon the southern part, they would be likely to encounter knots of surly types playing chole. This involves whacking a ball towards a distant target. This is not your average 400 metre fairway. The Flems set their target several kilometres away. The target could be anything from a tree or pole or rock or even the nearest village idiot.

The team heading for the target plays three strokes. Then the opposition, known as decholeurs, gets a chance to hit the ball as far as they can in the reverse direction. In other words, the game consists of three strokes forward, one stroke back. A bit like the African Union trying to get its peer review mechanism up and running.

Bloody Flemish.

It gets worse. In 1338, German shepherds were granted special dispensation to mark out their territories by striking a pebble with their crooks. The distance which the shot covered marked the extent of their grazing rights. I am not talking about Alsatian dogs, here. They might be bright, but they are hopeless with a crook. They perform far better when they are attached to the arm of a policeman. Anyway, German Shepherds mark out their territories in a far more vulgar fashion. Was this the forerunner of golf? The Germans like to think so.

A dead Dutch historian by the name of Steven van Hengel claimed that the Dutch invented golf. Well, no surprises there. He maintained that something called colf (what are the odds?) was already being played in northern Holland in 1297. The townsfolk played four holes measuring 4 950 yards to commemorate the relieving of Kronenburg Castle a year earlier. The castle was the refuge of two noblemen wanted for murder. They were eventually captured and torn apart by a baying mob that had set up camp outside the castle. Of course. I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the anniversary of a double homicide than with a colf tournament.

Colf continued to be played until the early 18th century before going out of fashion. Historians give no reasons for this, but knowing the Dutch as I do, I would say that after having whacked a ball about for a few hundred years, they realised that it was far more rewarding to have their threesomes and foursomes indoors with a few jugs of foaming lager and a log fire burning in the grate.

Since these early players had turned colf into a metaphor for group sex, it was left to others to reinvent the sport. After sitting around in a gloomy room waiting in vain for Rembrandt to come along and paint them, a group of pipe-smoking men with beards came up with an idea for a game called kolf. One thing you can never do is accuse the Dutch of lacking imagination.

Kolf was played on a considerably shorter course, only 20 metres in length. This allowed players to wrap up the game and still have time to stop off at the coffee shop for a hit on the old homegrown before dinner.

A 1668 painting by Adriaen van der Velde shows a bunch of dodgy types playing kolf on an icy wasteland in Haarlem. The man addressing the ball is wearing a skirt. The Scots claim that it is a kilt, but judging by his ladylike stance and puffy shoes, I would say that he was one of the first transsexual cross-dressers of that era.

Much like today, women were not encouraged to play the game. However, Mary Queen of Scots was having none of it. What nonsense! she shrieked, striding fiercely onto the primitive links at St Andrews. This is 1563 and we have the right to do what we wish! It was never clear whether she was referring to the royal we or women in general.

Not long afterwards, her husband, Lord Darnley, sustained an unexpected axe wound to the back of his head and died quietly in his sleep. Mary decided that her period of mourning was best spent knocking off a few holes at Seton House. The local constabulary was surprised to see her majesty punching the air after making her first birdie, particularly since her dearly beloved’s corpse was