Exclusivity Of Golf In U.S. Tortures Lover Of Game

`Golf seemed to me then the saddest kind of torture," Frank Bascombe says in Richard Ford's marvelous novel `"he Sportswriter."

For most of us, the game is more like sublime torture. It teases us with lush fairways and temples of timber that usher us to perfectly shaved greens. It is a black spider that loves us and kills us at the same time.

It is a game that began courting author John Strawn as he approached his 40s. A late-20th century Renaissance man, Strawn taught history at Portland's Reed College. He ran a successful construction business for a decade, but he had the heart and the head of a poet.

As he fell in love with golf, he began to undress it. He found himself wanting to know everything about it. How were these courses conceived? What sort of devil-genius designed golf courses? What kind of eye could look at 354 acres of flat south Florida marshland and see a golf course?

Strawn took his insatiable curiosity, his construction worker's eye, his clubs and his word processor to Palm Beach County. He followed one of the game's master architects, Arthur Hills, (designer of Mukilteo's Harbour Point Golf Club) as Hills turned a Florida flood plain into a championship challenge.

It must have been like watching the construction of an amusement park. Trees grew and were whimsically moved from place to place to create challenges. Mounds swelled where once there was only flatlands. Bunkers were carved and filled with clean, white sand.

Hills formed an artificial fairyland in Palm Beach County. He built a course that was as pleasing to the eyes as it was challenging to the irons. He created a playground for the masochistic mashers of that little white ball.

Not only did a new golf course, Ironhorse, emerge from the Florida flood plains, but a remarkable new book emerged as well.

"Driving The Green, The Making of a Golf Course," is an exhaustive, even dramatic story of the people, the politics, the love and the intrigue that goes into building these green oases we weekend warriors love to hate.

And, while researching and writing this book, Strawn acquired an even greater love for the game and a sincere concern for its future in the United States.

"I would like to make the point that golf is a wonderful game," Strawn said from his Portland home yesterday. "I really think that golf is so superior to the people who control it in the United States."

Strawn recently returned from Ireland and Scotland, where he played the devilish public links and found the roots of the game.

"When you play over there, you realize that golf truly is a people's game," he said. "It is a companionable game. It has deep democratic roots. We've made it into a game of exclusion."

The depth of golf's exclusionary policies were exposed last year at the PGA championship at Shoal Creek, a country club near Birmingham, Ala., that, at the time, excluded blacks. And, in Louisiana, an African-American youth was banned from playing in a district high-school tournament because the course was segregated. His teammates boycotted the tournament and his school sued the club.

Too many of today's new golfing cathedrals are too expensive, too exclusive for the common man. The courses become the magnets that draw people to expensive new houses that line the fairways. At Ironhorse, for instance, 325 lots are for sale; and the developers expect to make about $9 million.

Strawn, who learned the game on Portland's public courses, said he wants to see more municipal courses built. He wants to see golf returned to the proletariat.

Courses such as PGA West in La Quinta, Calif., and the TPC Course Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, Fla., are remarkable challenges to elite players. Three-hundred-yard bunkers, island greens, fairways as narrow as hallways.

But they are like the fastballs Boston's Roger Clemens throws. They aren't made for every hitter.

Strawn also said he would like to see more courses such as Bally Liffin, a course he recently played in Donegal, Ireland.

"It is a typical links course," Strawn said. "The land is marginal land. There are giant sand dunes. Wind blown. Wild grasses. The sea before you. The hills behind you. It was as grand a golf course as I could possibly play. It only cost 7 pounds (approximately $12) and, if your legs could take it, you could play all day.

"Here (Ireland), and in Scotland, the game is very much a game for the people. They have the right spirit there. The cab driver taking you to the course might be a two handicap. There isn't the air of exclusivity and isolation that the American game has."

The links game is more accommodating to the average player. Maybe the best way to play the 14th hole is to drive up the sixth fairway. You can't do that on most club courses in the United States. You would end up in somebody's backyard swimming pool.

"If you pick a good site and are careful in the building, a golf course can be a wonderful addition to the community," Strawn said. "But it's easy to lose sight of that."

Maybe golf is the saddest form of torture. Maybe it is the sweetest. But, in this country, the people who develop the courses and play the game must remember its roots. It should be a game opened to everyone.