Golf In The Year 2115

It looks, at first, to be one of those gifty books that shove their way so bullishly into stores at this time of year: a spoof, but a good one. As someone who writes about golf for a living, one has to admire – even envy, for a brief flash - the playful ingenuity of the idea: a fake novel predicting what golf would be like in the modern age, supposedly written in the “olden days” by a pretend, golfy writer (“J McCullough” indeed!). They’ve even frayed the edges of the pages to give them that cod authentic theme pub olde worlde look. But then you look a bit more closely, noting the earnest Editor’s Foreword and the original publication details. Slowly, you began to look at the artefact from a new angle.

First published in 1892, Golf In the Year 2000 is not one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written about golf – you probably would have found more wit, narrative arc and incisive observation about the frustrations of the game in the furthest recesses of PG Wodehouse’s waste paper basket – but it may be one of the most culturally telling. In its story of Alexander John Gibson, a golfer who falls asleep in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, and wakes up over a hundred years later, it predicts digital watches, female politicians, the decimal system and a rudimentary version of Sky TV. McCullough’s vision of the current golfing climate is uncannily close to the real thing as well, featuring metal woods, motorised trolleys and a craze for ever-longer courses.

McCullough doesn’t get everything right. Perhaps most misguided of all is his prediction that, more than ten decades on, someone wouldn’t have realised that playing in a big, heavy jacket would inhibit your swing. Despite his best hopes, it is still impossible to get from one side of Britain to another in half an hour, and his description of the cleaning devices of the future (“the whole structure began to fly round and about and backwards and forwards, till I was almost drowned”) sound more like he’s talking about the Orgasmatron in Sleeper than a futuristic shower. When he writes about a world where all the women work so all the men can do nothing but play golf, you realise he’s not so much a novelist as a creator of novelty sports mug slogans who has been given a bit too much literary leeway. Nonetheless, in his irritatingly breezy, throwaway story, there is an ominous message to be found: something powerful about the inevitability of evolution. If a writer as bland and trifling as McCullough could look into his crystal ball and come up with something that so closely resembles golf in the early Twenty First Century, then what does that tell us? I think it either tells us that a) we were always going to be where we are now, as a human, and golfing universe, or/and b) that stuff was a hell of a lot easier to predict in the old days than it is now.

Towards the end of Golf In The Year 2000, Gibson gets a little disenchanted with newfangled golf and announces, “I think I like the old days best after all”. McCullough’s comparisons between then and now are without depth, but they presage an argument so commonly heard today: Is the new technology taking the art out of the game? Unlike Gibson and his fictional “Golfton” club, we 21st Century golfers don’t have dials which determine how far we hit our putts – not unless we’re on our Xboxes and Nintendos we don’t, anyway – nor are we able to switch the wind off and on, but we do seem to be living in a kind of golfing Endland, where every part of the game has been pushed to its limits, and any new innovation would be more tokenistic than it was useful. Recently, I tried to think of some of my own golfing predictions for 108 years from now. The best I came up with were:
1. Wooden-headed irons.
2. Air caddies.
3. Self-cleaning grooves.
4. “From the makers of Superglue: Divot Seal!”
5. Unleaded driver fuel.
Finding a bit tough, I reined it in a bit, and decided to set my golfing utopia in 2025 instead, coming up with:
1. Radar balls.
2. The first openly bisexual Ryder Cup player.
3. John Daly: The Opera.
4. The Rooftop PGA.
5. Shankless wedges.

These days, it’s not so much a case as “the future’s so bright, you’ve got to wear shades” as “the future’s so opaque, you’ve got to have some special kind of laser surgery that hasn’t been invented yet”. Of course, back in the 90s, many people might have thought home entertainment had reached some kind of final frontier with DVDs and CDs, then Sky Plus and the iPod came along. Soon, something will probably come along to replace them. But golf does seem to have reached some kind of limit, at least in purely physical terms. Our best courses have squeezed every inch of extra space available out of their terrain in order to lengthen their holes to brutal new championship standards. In most cases, there is nowhere left to extend, other than the local bypass or the outgoing Lady Captain’s rhododendrons. In the unlikely event that a world-beating player comes along who is more toned and fit and strong than Tiger Woods, then his fitness will probably have minimal impact on his golfing prowess. Is there that much further to on the PGA long driving stats after Bubba Watson?

For the last three decades, Olympic sprinting has repeatedly appeared to reach a brilliant, never-to-be-passed limit, and repeatedly proceeded to smash its records. But nobody is ever going to run 100 metres in three seconds. Golf is currently in a similar situation: every year, the driving stats creep up, Augusta gets harder and less interesting, par fours you previously thought were monstrous suddenly become thought of as medium length, but it can’t go on indefinitely. I’m not complaining: the new power game was one of the premier reasons that I began playing golf again in the early part of this decade, after a long lay-off. But one wonders how the evolution can continue.

Perhaps the answer lies not in a move forwards, or even directly backwards, but sideways. If golf is an art form – and I feel certain that it is – perhaps it will mirror other art forms that have had their great revolutions, then turned to smaller, more subtle innovations and reworkings of their past for inspiration. Golf has moved towards the city in recent years, but the game of urban golf, or street golf, where players hit soft balls down city streets and hole out in fire hydrant covers, is still in its very early stages of development. Hopefully the tragic young death of the founder of The Shoreditch Urban, Jeremy Feakes, earlier this year, will not lead to the event’s demise, since it showcases a unique game that requires its own kind of skill, and has the potential to be much more than an excuse for web designers to get drunk and wear plus fours (and I’m not just saying this because I won it last year).

There may be no need to ban all drivers made after 1997 and start using hickory shafts and balls that take on the shape and texture of a satsuma after you’ve thinned them. Equally, however, there is no reason that we shouldn’t revisit the golfing technology of the past. Mix it up a bit: let’s have an Urban Tour, a Power Tour, and a Vintage Tour. And what about beach golf? Has anyone really looked into that yet? Okay, so maybe I’m getting a bit carried away, but it proves that just because we may have reached a kind of robotic impasse in our top tournaments, that is no reason that we should stagnate. The future is not the place it used to be, but it’s not necessarily a barren desert populated by swinging cyborgs. It’s worth remembering that McCullough probably felt like he was living in some sort of End Of Time environment when he wrote Golf In The Year 2000 too – hope for an escape from it was probably part of his motivation for writing the book. We might think we’re living in the last days of golfing civilisation, but so will the generation after us, and countless generations after them, until one day, three men stand on the final tee in some distant Urban Beach Golf Championship of the future, pouring jet fuel into the nozzles at the top of their drivers, air caddies waiting faithfully beside them, and the lights go out for the last time.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF SERGIO GARCIA! Out now...