What Golf and Pornography Have in Common

As a casual daily reader of the sports section, I'm interested in what people say about the sports they play. A few years ago professional golfer Ben Crenshaw was participating in practice rounds for The Master's golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Knowing he had little chance of winning the tournament in the latter stages of his career, Crenshaw said something about how he enjoyed "being out in nature" while playing in the tournament.

That quote made me stop and think about golf and nature. Is a golf course truly a natural environment? Or is it something else altogether? In truth a golf course is really an exaggerated form of nature, a highly manipulated environment designed by human beings for their own amusement. For millions of golfers, however, the golf course is the closest experience they have to real nature. So let's take a look at what that means.

When I was young our family lived next to a golf course. My friends and I romped barefoot over its spacious fairways each summer. In winter we sledded down hills offering quarter mile slopes unimpeded by trees. The golf course was a paradise of pleasures so long as we respected the golfers in season and did not ride our bikes across the tees or greens at anytime.

Later in life as a high school and college distance runner I ran a number of cross country races on golf courses. The sensation of flying across closely trimmed grass on a clear fall day was a pleasure indeed.

Eventually I also learned to play golf reasonably well. My scores usually fall in the 85-95 range. Bogey golf. I've broken 80 exactly once, but the card was turned in at a tournament so I have no record of my lone triumph in the sport. Mostly I enjoy walking the course or riding a cart at resort courses where walking would take forever.

All these experiences taught me that a golf course is a pleasant place to be. In recent years a few courses have become National Audubon Society certified golf courses. These are properties where nature really does hold its own. Audubon certified courses purposely limit their use of chemicals and set aside wetlands, woods and fields for wildlife. In many cases these concessions to wilderness enhance the golfing experience by bringing native plants and wildlife into the golf experience. Some do provide habitat for species desperate for living space. Golf has indeed gone greener the last two decades.

These changes still don't mean golf courses are true expressions of nature. While playing one course in Phoenix, Arizona, I asked one of the owners how much water it took to keep the course green year round. "A million gallons a day," he told me. I looked through the fence at the desert beyond and could not help thinking that a golf course does not belong in a desert if it takes a million gallons of water a day to maintain.

Experiences like these have convinced me that most golf courses are more like a form of nature pornography; earth's topography airbrushed for humankind's prurient enjoyment.

Which brings us to a direct comparison between golf and that other great obsession of the human race: pornography.

As kids we grow up wondering what sex is all and hope we're lucky enough to get some one day. At some point in life we discover dirty pictures and our vision of sex takes on a whole different meaning. That is, pornography takes over a certain part of our brain. And don't try to tell me you're immune to pornography. It is, after all, a 97.06B revenue source worldwide. About 80% of all porn is consumed by men. That leaves room for a ton of women too.

Do an unfiltered Google search on almost any topic and you will find pornographic images. It takes willpower and probably a strong dose of religious faith to resist the modern pornography machine. It is said that "porn drives technology" because the human appetite for illicit imagery is so strong it has helped create markets and ultimately machines to help deliver sex in all its forms.

Porn seems to have started way back in ancient times with carved totems and talismans designed to capture or express the human sex drive. Nowadays those totems are limitless and exponential. The internet is a fertile landscape of pornographic pictures, movies, literature and hookups for people of every persuasion and taste.

So here's where the real comparison begins. I'm here to tell you that the internet is to sex... what golf is to nature.

To review, let's go back to golf and nature for just a moment. As a long time bird watcher, naturalist and wildlife artist, I'm familiar with how unrelentingly uncomfortable real wilderness can make you feel. Real, untrammeled nature is not at all like a golf course, where manicured greens and halfway houses cater to our pampered appetites and real nature is kept at bay.

That is the dynamic so amusingly depicted in the movie Caddyshack. Actor Bill Murray tussles with a pesky groundhog whose main goal seems to be tearing up the golf course. Meanwhile, actor Chevy Chase gets involved in a greasily pornographic relationship with a younger woman and the rest of the cast's characters seem to be obsessed with getting or receiving sex in one way or another.

The golf course, you see, stands as a key haven for sexual tension. Its rolling undulations of green fairways resemble the smooth, feminine curves of a beautiful woman. But it is a deception. A golf course is an airbrushed version of nature. Like a Playboy model staring at you from the centerfold, most golf courses are a sheen of illusion. The real girl is there somewhere behind all those carefully edited blemishes, but you'll never see her if the golf course superintendent has his or her way. Golf is all about the sensual experience of puttering around on perfection. It is an arguably healthy masturbation that takes more than four hours to complete. When we look behind the surface of the game, golf is really nothing more than a highly staged search for gratification. It is too bad the greater portion of participants tends to go home unsatisfied.

In the end, perhaps the pursuit of elusive, illicit pleasure is something many of us crave, somehow. Jack Benny said it best in this quote, "Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air."

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