Rich Man's Game?

The following is an article I read from Saturday's San Diego UT. I thought it was an interesting take on a game that wouldn't allow minorities to play on Tour until 1961.




Politics a lot like swings: majority are on the right

By Mark Zeigler
STAFF WRITER

June 14, 2008

If you don't want to get hit by an errant golf ball at Torrey Pines South this weekend, if you don't want a 392-dimple Titleist Pro V1 imprinted on your forehead from a 325-yard drive, try standing on the left side of the fairway.

Because this is a sport, at least in this country, that definitely drifts right.
More and more professional athletes vote Republican, presumably because they make huge sums of money and believe the Republicans won't make them part with it in taxes. But no group of American athletes may be more unanimously conservative than PGA Tour golfers.

David Duval and Billy Andrade have come out and admitted it: They're registered Democrats.

You'll be hard-pressed to find many others on the PGA Tour, although it should be noted Commissioner Tim Finchem worked in the Carter administration and once was vice president of the Democratic National Committee.

“Definitely a conservative bunch of guys,” Australia's Geoff Ogilvy said this week.

How conservative?

“Well over 90 percent would be Republican,” two-time U.S. Open winner Lee Janzen said. “(Democrats) are definitely in the minority.”

Four years ago, Golf Digest magazine polled 34 Tour players about their preferences in the presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Bob Tway threw his support behind Bush and predicted the magazine wouldn't “find anybody on this tour voting for Kerry.”

It didn't. Eight said they were undecided or refused to divulge their allegiance; the other 26 backed Bush.

It makes sense. Pro golfers tend to come from wealthy, white, Southern, evangelical Christian upbringings – demographics that traditionally skew right when it comes to politics.

“If you look at who hangs out around golf, it's people like Rush Limbaugh and Dan Quayle,” says Orin Starn, a Duke University professor of cultural anthropology who writes a Web blog devoted to golf politics. “If you go to John McCain's Web site, there's a golf gear buying opportunity. Golf has always been the official sport of business and capitalism and the American way, and country clubs have been bastions of Republican Party support and conservative idealogy.

“You have your occasional left-wing golfer, but they're the rare bird,” Starn said.

Added Janzen: “We're all from a similar background. Very few of us grew up playing public courses. . . . Golf's an expensive sport, and I think it will be another decade before we see the benefits from programs like The First Tee (for inner-city youths). Right now, you have a better chance at making it when you're at a country club atmosphere with access to good practice facilities, good teachers and good courses.

It can be a jarring realization for the increasing number of foreign golfers on tour and at events such as the U.S. Open, coming from a culture that is generally more open about discussing politics. Several foreigners have said privately they are hesitant to express their views in a public forum, fearing they will be ostracized for, say, supporting abortion rights or gay marriage.

In a 2006 article that appeared in U.S. and European publications, journalist Bruce Selcraig wrote of an incident with Tom Lehman regarding former President Bill Clinton:

“Lehman, who has never hidden his right-wing politics, once overheard me say the word 'Clinton' while I was interviewing a caddie on the driving range . . . Unsmiling, he stopped in midstride, walked over and said: 'You mean that draft-dodging baby-killer?' and then walked on.”

In the same article, Selcraig quoted Sweden's Jesper Parnevik saying: “People get hurt very badly if they speak out.”

England's Paul Casey did at the 2004 Ryder Cup, telling a British newspaper that “the vast majority of Americans simply don't know what is going on. They have no concept of the U.K., for instance.”

Casey was heckled by fans and reportedly given the cold shoulder by American players on tour, and was even dropped by Titleist as a sponsor. Asked after a practice round this week about the tour's political leanings, Casey said: “I think talking politics is dangerous. I'm not going to comment.”

It is a subject rarely broached in public. Or as Charles Howell III put it: “That's one thing I have learned not to talk about.”

One reason, certainly, is a reluctance by pro athletes to alienate potential consumers for the products they so lucratively endorse – the “Republicans buy sneakers, too” mantra Michael Jordan espoused in the early 1990s. Another reason, Duke's Starn suggests, is fear of damaging golf's efforts to remake its stuffy image.

“The PGA doesn't want this stuff talked about, because if players did speak up more it would become apparent that an overwhelming majority are right-wing, evangelical Christians,” said Starn, a golfer with a 5-handicap. “You see the PGA putting up this image of embracing multiculturalism that really covers up the reality of how white the PGA Tour is right now.

“It doesn't look like America, and if it's shown that it doesn't think like America, either, that can't be good for a game trying to sell itself as having an appeal to Americans across the board.”

Of a dozen or so players interviewed at this U.S. Open, Janzen was the most candid. He talked about an online survey that asked the survey taker's stance on a dozen issues and to rate the issues in importance, and then spewed out which presidential candidates best suited his positions.

Janzen's top four candidates were all Republicans.

His bottom four: all Democrats.

“But, you know, we live in a bubble on tour,” Janzen said. “We have a good life out here. We don't deal with a lot of things that other people deal with on an everyday basis.”