I’m not inclined to ponder the ethics of golf, but Steve Sailer is:
Now, you might think that what would actually be most interesting from an ethical perspective about golf is that it’s the most prominent sport in which players are required to referee themselves on the honor code. In 1984, I watched Arnold Palmer knock himself of contention on the next to last hole of the United States Senior Open by calling a penalty on himself that absolutely no one else saw or even could have seen. In sharp contrast, the culture of most other big time sports encourages players to cheat when the ref isn’t looking.
What prompted Sailer to consider the topic was a recent New York Times Magazine column, in which “ethicist” Randy Cohen asks, is golf unethical?
Last week in Berlin, the International Olympic Committee’s executive board voted to recommend that golf be included in the 2016 Games; the full membership will vote in October. In July, in Caracas, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez denounced golf as “a bourgeois sport,” and officials have taken steps to close two courses. The joys or miseries of playing the game aside, when it comes to assessing golf’s underlying ethos, who is more persuasive, Chávez or the I.O.C.?
I can’t imagine taking Chávez seriously — but Cohen can:
While it would be oversimplifying either to uncritically exalt or utterly damn the culture of golf, on balance Chávez has the stronger case. The golf community, like most others, is neither monolithic nor immutable, but the current customs and values of big-time professional golfers, those most likely to dominate Olympic play, seem remote from the Olympic ideal. …American golfers are even more homogeneous and more conservative than their global colleagues, Selcraig asserts, citing a Sports Illustrated survey of 76 P.G.A. tour players: 91 percent endorsed the confirmation of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.; 88 percent supported the invasion of Iraq; and 0 percent had seen “Brokeback Mountain.” Not science, perhaps, but not unrevealing.
As stated on an official Olympic Web site, “the goal of the Olympic Movement” — it is a movement, not just a gateway to a Wheaties box — “is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination … with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” The culture Selcraig describes is more redolent of a gated community than amiable international populism.
As Sailer remarks, the ethical issue for golf is whether it wants to lower itself to the level of the Olympics.