From ‘Golfer bashed at Kranji Course’, 11 Dec 2011, article by Teh Jen Lee, TNP
Golf is hardly a contact sport, but a fight broke out between two golfers on Wednesday morning, landing one of them in hospital. The name of the golfers are not known, but the incident took place at the Kranji Sanctuary Golf Course, near Hole 3.
…While verbal arguments can take place quite often, up to once a week sometimes, they do not usually escalate to physical violence…A common flashpoint is when a golfer hits a ball and it lands too close to another golfer. The first golfer is supposed to shout “Fore!” but sometimes they do not, or the other golfer does not hear.
Another source of friction is when a golfer’s ball falls near another’s and he mistakenly hits the wrong ball, thus disrupting the other golfer’s play. Mr Daniel Ng, 50, who has been golfing for about 20years, said he has seen golfers drive their buggy to confront the other golfer and demand an explanation.
“They will shout threatening things like ‘You watch out’. But it’s mostly verbal and they normally won’t use their golf equipment as a weapon,” said Mr Ng, who is a golf instructor. Things can also get heated when betting is involved and the players argue about the rules of the game, he added.
(Mr Robert Koh): “Sometimes people are impatient over slow play or they perceive others to be playing dangerously. It happened to my friend. He hit a ball and someone in the group ahead of him was not happy as they had not moved off yet so they lodged a complaint. He honestly didn’t know because there was a blind spot there.”
You have been FORE-warned. Golf is a deceptively dangerous sport, and no longer the realm of gentlemen ever since the Tiger Woods sex fiasco. It only appears to be safe because it proceeds at such an excruciatingly slow and tedious pace without anything much happening that I suspect golfers are secretly craving for some brute confrontation, blood and sweat like ‘real’ sports. The time one takes to place a shot is just the length of time for one to methodically plot a murder. Arguments over ball placements and dangerous putts may get you clobbered with a club, a fearsome weapon that ranks among the deadliest sports equipment along with the baseball bat and hockey stick. If you have a good aim and a nasty swing, you could even fracture someone’s skull with a well placed golf ball if you’re going for remote killing. Irate golfers also have a bonus vehicle at their disposal to mow down anyone who so much as touches the wrong ball during play.
The chilling potential of golf equipment to terrorise was captured in a little South Korean film called 3-Iron. In the disturbing horror-thriller Funny Games, a golf club was the weapon of choice of psychopaths holding a family hostage. Golf courses get blown up and bums are used as target practice in the 80′s goofball flick Caddyshack, while Adam Sandler lampooned the sport’s inherent violence to fart-joke proportions in Happy Gilmore. I can’t name one serious film about golf as a profession, and flamboyant as Tiger Woods may be, no one has considered making a movie out of his larger-than-life story to date. Golf is usually portrayed in film as a device for mayhem or Candid-camera standards of low-brow comedy, and ironically this dramatic exaggeration of an otherwise dreary sport which makes Gateball look like Dodgeball in comparison has spilled over into real life.
Forget the spacious, picturesque oases or SANCTUARIES of green calm and tranquility that our golf clubs like to imagine themselves to be. In 2009, some Singapore Island Country Club golfers came to blows with some punks trespassing on the green. According to one of the victims, ‘spades, tee markers and golf balls‘ were being flung all over the place. Tee markers are basically sharp pins, while balls are lethal projectiles in their own right. This is no ‘sanctuary’, it’s an armory, a battlefield. With the added benefit of shrub cover, tee boxes, ponds and protected space, golf is probably one of the rare sports in which one can wage armed battle or commit murder without anyone noticing.
There are golf hazards aside from getting into brawls. If you’re extremely unlucky, you could get electrocuted by lightning, as what happened last year at Sentosa Golf Club, and this year at Laguna National Golf and Country Club. If not death by lightning in a sudden storm, then by falling branches (Golfer killed by falling branch during storm, June 1997). You could also accidentally drive your buggy into a pond and drown (‘Death at golf club’, 2010), or die ‘mysteriously’ (Body found in lake’, 2 Aug 2002, ST, also Sentosa Golf Club). More commonly, you may lose your sight after being hit in the eye by stray golf balls, or inflict brain injury upon a child (No idea what children are doing on golf courses either). You don’t even have to launch a golf ball to hurt someone. In the 70′s, cutting a ball in half alone may trigger an explosion due to its ‘pressurised liquid core’, and there was even a medical paper written on the case. So not only are fast balls as dangerous as rubber bullets, they are unpredictable mini grenades which you should keep away from curious children at all costs.
If you’re a clumsy novice who’s too eager to land a first birdie, you may hit yourself on the head/face with your own club/ricocheted ball slapstick-style, sustain back injuries and even your ELBOWS from holding the club too tightly (Golf goofs, July 2001, Today). According to a 1991 British Medical Journal article, golf is more dangerous for kids than skateboarding, horseriding or even SOCCER, with most hospitalised after being struck by a club or a ball. Even if you play golf in knight’s armour, it won’t guarantee safety to NON-golfers i.e caddies, lawn cutters, gardeners etc who suffer because of a wild, impatient putt.
So, why are our soccer players and racecar drivers getting all the attention and biographical movies, when the true sports warriors whom we should really admire are golfers, professionals who risk it all on the fairways (or FEARways?): Blindness, drowning, buggy collisions, electrocution, back/hip injury, elbow/wrist injury, skull fracture and death, all for the singular purpose of getting a ball into a tiny hole.
Filed under: 1960s, 1970s, 2010, 2011, Clubs, Fun and games, Sports, Violence Tagged: | golf, sports, Violence
