Here's to Michael Forbes

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should state up front that I find golf to be one of the biggest wastes of human ingenuity and natural resources on the planet, ranking somewhere between NASCAR and the burning of the rain forests, the sporting equivalent of the millions of old Air Supply albums slowly rotting away in landfills across greater American suburbia.

In the first place, golf is not really a sport to at all. The whacking of an inanimate object is not a sport. Golf may require a lot of talent, it may take a lifetime to master, as they say, but a sport involves some notion of direct human competition. Sport is, in its essence, ritualized warfare. Someone’s got to be trying to stop you from hitting that inanimate object into a hole. Football is a sport. Basketball is a sport. Ice hockey is a sport. Golf is an outdoor hobby, beloved by many, but it is not a sport.

I’ve had friends tell me that I look at golf with a jaundiced eye because I am a lover of tennis, and that the players of tennis and golf are like cats and dogs, forever doomed not to get along. That may be true, and while I’ll save for another time any kind of extended defense of the game of kings, let me briefly state that tennis is a battle of brain and brawn, one that rewards all the great sporting skills, including strength, speed, and dexterity. The fact tennis is a sport may not make it superior to golf, but for me it is a much more satisfying game. So I realize that I’m a yapping terrier here, upset at the Persian who left its filthy hair all over my master’s Ottoman, when I probably wouldn’t give a shit if a dog had done the same thing.

That said, I blame golf most of all for being a land grab by those who want to mercantilize our public space, to buy up our open space and then charge the well heeled jocks among us to walk around and whack their balls on it. This may not be so apparent in an older community like Chicago, where the public space, from the city parks to the forest preserves, were set aside long ago, back when the ideals of American democracy were taken seriously. But if you head out to many new communities, particularly in the South and West, a huge chunk of the “public” open land consists of golf courses.

When many of these golf courses are first built (and “built” is the right term, because they are among the most artificial of environments, a fantasy landscape created to mimic an imaginary pastoral scene that never really existed, often plopped into a native landscape of scrub brush or desert), it may seem like a fair exchange, because the course is paid for by the developer, it lowers the overall density of the development, and it allows the folks who can afford to live around it a nice view and peaceful walks at night. But what is lost in this equation is that soon all of the property on the outskirts of this development will also be developed, and that in a decade or so the golf course will be the primary open space left, as the city fathers didn’t deem it a priority to set aside truly public spaces like parks and nature preserves, and the developer was only too happy to cooperate with this blinkered idea of what constitutes a community. So golf courses become the primary open space in these towns, accessible only to those willing to pay to play on it or live around it. The rest of us plebes are not welcome.

Which brings me to Michael Forbes. You might have seen on the news that Donald Trump is trying to buy up a 1,400-acre chunk of mostly open wilderness on the northeast coast of Scotland to turn into a designer golf resort, but that a few of the Scottish locals are stepping up to fight him (for a summary of the battle over the proposed Trump resort, click the Tribune link here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/thursday/chi-trump_hundleydec06,0,2253940.story)

Key among them is one Michael Forbes, a former worker on an offshore oil rig, who saved up to buy 23 acres of Scottish heath that is in the middle of the proposed golf resort and who refuses to sell his land to Mr. Trump, no matter what the price. There’s also Mickey Foote, producer of the first Clash album, who now lives in the Aberdeen area and has helped organize opposition to turning 1,400 acres of pristine Scottish wilderness into “a gated community for rich people.”

The Aberdeenshire Council’s infrastructure committee recently rejected Trump’s proposal, looking to negotiate some environmental safeguards before approving the project. Predictably, Trump refuses to negotiate, so the two sides are at a standstill. If this was in the U.S., with the federal courts and U.S. government now firmly in the hands of the people rich enough to afford a phalanx of D.C. lobbyists, Mr. Trump would simply have some governmental authority declare that Mr. Forbes land is now Trump’s via eminent domain. And a version of that may still happen, as the Scottish executive has “relieved” the Aberdeenshire Council of its authority in the matter.

You couldn’t find a more appropriate poster boy for golf than Donald Trump, if for no other reason than his abysmal taste in women matches well with the Stepford Wives of the PGA. Not so coincidently, he is also the perfect symbol for the new American aristocracy, where the sons and daughters of wealth who learn to play the game have the inside track to much of the trillions being handed out by the global banking industry, even when, as in Trump’s case, he’s shown no ability to manage money, has a penchant for trashy architecture that rivals his bad taste in women, and has had to declare bankruptcy two times and counting. If he didn’t have the right connections, Trump would be the kind of dissolute spendthrift that the Republicans write laws against. Instead, he’s an American icon. “You’re fired,” Trump arrogantly declares, playing his role for the camera, and America, or at least a large chunk of the TV watching public, eats it up.

After failing as a real estate developer in the 1980’s, Trump struck it rich, at least for awhile, in the “gaming” industry, as it is called, and, while I’ve spent many a night with my parents in the casinos of Laughlin and Vegas, and I really enjoy the occasional game of Texas Hold ‘em with the guys, “gaming” has got to be one of the most tawdry ways on the planet to make your cash, a mathematics of guaranteed return that feeds on the human addiction to take bad risks. If you ask me, the bourgeoning U.S. casino industry is a tell tale sign of the approaching Apocalypse, up there with multi-million dollar executive bonuses and aerosol cheese.

So here’s to Michael Forbes, a little guy who refuses to be bowed by the Great American Jackass. I wish him well.