Golf is the most useless sport. EVER.

When I was about six, my father took me to the driving range for the very first time in my life. He had just taken up golf himself, and I being the dutiful but not-quite-prodigal son, followed him to see how my daddy was going to hit white balls with steel sticks. He got better at it while I got more and more frustrated as to why I had to shwing my body like an idiot. After awhile, my father even bought me a golf set for me, which I used to hit balls no further than a few metres away from me. My technique was all about brutal power; I swung as though a small head of a person I despised was on the pedestal where the ball is placed, imagining hitting it with all my strength and hearing the screams as the mutilated head disappears into the horizon. By the end of the day, my hand would be blistered and my butt strangely skewed to the right. I was too young to go on the green but I did attend a golf tournament once. I hated it. The only thing I like about golf is ironically, not actually playing golf. I don’t mind hitting balls. I just don’t see the reason why I have to hit it so far only for me to retrieve it some kilometres away and eventually push it into a hole in the ground.

Simply put: Golf is retarded.

The cost of taking up golf is enough for me to put a down-payment on a small car. On top of that, the cost of membership is an astonishing sum. You could feed a whole African village suffering from abject poverty and still have a bit more for medicine. Golf courses are so vast that they could be turned into wildlife reserves instead of having foreign labour manicuring the grass twice a day. The haughtiness golf generates is absurd. If your set is second-hand or worse, a cheap one, the wealthier folk will turn their nose up and say that their sticks are better. They feel deign to talk to you, no matter what.

Have you ever seen an overweight badminton player? A rotund F1 driver? Besides bowling, which sport lets you get away with being stout and chunky while wearing your grandma’s chequered trousers? Golf lets you get away with being unhealthy by making you think you’re healthy. You hit a ball, get on the buggy, stop, hit the ball again, get on the bloody buggy again, repeat and go back to the club and enjoy a lunch featuring a spread that would make any food nutritionist gag.

Sports are supposed to make you healthy, not porky.

Golf is a selfish person’s “sport”. There’s no I in team and golf perfectly demonstrates that. There’s of course the Ryder Cup where there’s two groups vying for lots of money and bragging rights. But it’s a group of selfish individuals. There’s no teamwork whatsoever.

People are paying millions every year just to hit a ball with sticks of varying materials and number on its shiny head. Yet the same can also be said about football, with players earning an obscene amount of $100,000 per week. We pay basketball stars a lot of money just for them to slam dunk a rubber ball into a basket. We see tennis players shrieking (Maria Sharapova squeals like a pig at times), stomping, and make us eat overly priced strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. Why do we venerate these mere mortals? What makes them “special”? Is it a primal thing? Is it a man thing? (I say man thing simply because men are into sports as women are into shopping. Generalising, I know, but it’s the closest thing I can think of.)

Golf can disappear for all I care. Just don’t touch my football.

This is Chris, signing off.

PS: Michelle Wie is kind of hot. Still too young for me, though!