The centre cannot hold. All that is pure is gone. They’re shaving Aslan’s mane up there at the Centurion Club in Hemel Hempstead. And it has, of course, been genuinely shocking to see the grand old community game of professional golf, with its deep social ties, the beating heart of our post-industrial towns, reduced so easily to a row of shrugging men in leisure wear doing stuff on their own for money.
This is after all the people’s game, or at least the People Like Us game, still played on every cobbled street and in every playground, providing that playground is at least 300 yards wide and fenced from public access; a place where all you need is the ball, the green grass, hundreds of pounds of equipment and not to be in the inner city. Who could have guessed that professional golf would be so vulnerable to greed and self-interest?
