 Imagine it. It could work. The Open this year is at St Andrew’s, and golf has the same problems as always. Everyone is walking in the same direction (pretty much – these are professionals, after all) and every player refuses to share their ball. This is not head-to-head sport for those of us who like a bit of direct to-ing and fr0-ing, the pitting of one player against another.
What golf neds is the equivalent of T20 cricket, and I have the answer.
The admin people at the R & A should stand on the first tee (if I remember correctly) and look over the North Sea to Holland. At the same time they should squint until the past comes into view: the future can be found in the ancient Dutch game of Kolven.
The singular of Kolven is Kolf, but the Wikipedia entry for the game of Kolven bears no resemblance to a description I once read in a 1947 book called Ball, Bat and Bishop, by Robert W.Henderson. This book was written and published before the Internet, so it’s almost certainly correct, and the information needs to be spread before it gets lost beneath the curse of the recent.
Henderson describes an outdoors golf game with sticks, but crucially, players use only one ball. There is an attacking side and a defending side. The attackers name a target that is at least four shots away, usually the door of a church or perhaps a distant gate across the flat Dutch lowlands. The attacker names a par score to hit the ball to the target. The defenders will probably laugh.
The attackers start off with three shots in a row. The third shot is where strategy begins, because after the third shot the defenders get their turn to hit the ball. The defenders must stop the attackers reaching the church door in their specified number of shots.
I imagine the defenders just whack it as far as possible. Or they might aim at a foxhole or the middle of a dike. Sadly, Henderson doesn’t discuss tactics, nor whether the defenders then have an attack of their own.
A variation on this game would give golf the direct contest and contemporary appeal it currently lacks. Instructions for the R & A are included below, and the commitee men can tweak as they see fit, but the basics are all here. The game uses existing courses. It retains the benefits of open air exercise and the basic shots remain the same. Accuracy is still at a premium, as well as an ability to read the landscape. The added value is in the reading of another player’s mind, and the need to evaluate his skills.
The rules:
A game for two players. It can also be played as doubles, in the Ryder cup for example.
The game is played tee to tee (as opposed to tee to green). There will be par 3’s, par 4’s and par 5’s. The committee can set up the course however they see fit, using whichever tees suit the purpose of the game.
Player 1 hits first. His objective is to land the ball on the nominated target tee. This is the tee Player 2 is defending.
Player 2 hits second. He hits the same ball as the Player 1, with his target the tee that Player 1 has just used as his starting point.
Players alternate shots. First to land the ball on the opposing tee is the winner.
Normal golf rules apply – Out of Bounds etc. A penalty shot gives two consecutive shots to the opposing player.
The Player who hits first can use a tee-peg, but no aids will be used thereafter. This means that the first striker (the server?) has an advantage.
First strike will either alternate or go to whoever wins the previous hole.
Hell, people, do some experimenting. See what works.
A final rule: The ball cannot be played backwards away from the target tee (otherwise the game could go on forever).
So now it’s over to the R & A. All I ask is a portrait next to Old Tom Morris.
Bad workmen blame their tools.
In South Africa there have been three major goalkeeping howlers after four days of matches. England, Algeria and Paraguay have all seen their keepers bamboozled by what most people would think was a familiar sight to the man in goal: an approaching round object known as a ball.
Apparently the official 2010 World Cup ball, the ‘Jabulani’, deviates unpredictably in the air. Some have blamed the manufacture, others the effect of altitude at some of the South African stadiums. A football is not a technologically tricksy idea. There is only so much that can go wrong, and most people have rightly assumed that the complaining goalkeepers have other ‘issues’. Like not being very good at keeping goal.
Or so I thought, until I looked at this picture in today’s Guardian. This Jabulani ball does not look round. It is round, and our eyes adjust to make it round like a football. But look at it closely. The illustrative design on the ball has created the optical illusion of a shape more like an egg.
This is a sensational discovery. Eggs don’t have a centre, as a ball does. If kicked, an egg would wobble.
When a goalkeeper is aiming to get his body behind the ball his eyes and instinct search for the centre of the ball as his target. The ‘centre’ of the Jabulani may be unclear because of an optical illusion caused by the branded decoration on the ball itself. This means that goalkeepers, especially under pressure, are more likely to misjudge the flight of the Jabulani and make mistakes.
This is the answer. Someone should be told.
 - The Real Thing
There’s an old rugby saying: if you’re good enough, you’re big enough. The actor Matt Damon would have to be very good indeed. In Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, Damon plays the role of 1995 Rugby World Cup winning captain Francois Pienaar. He is 5 inches shorter and 4 stones lighter – the All Blacks would snap him in half.
At 5’10” Matt Damon is also shorter than Nelson Mandela (6’1”), who in Eastwood’s film is played by Morgan Freeman (6’2”). Winning the World Cup as the shortest man in the room is the kind of exploit that Hollywood loves.
Invictus is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, which describes Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to seduce white South Africans to his vision of the Rainbow Nation. ‘Don’t address their brains,’ he said at the time, ‘address their hearts.’ And deep in the Afrikaaner heart is a love of Rugby Union.
For a potential Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, the obscurity of rugby presents a problem. What, exactly, is this strange-looking game? The bemused film critic of the Tucson Weekly described the Invictus sports action as ‘a bunch of guys groaning a lot,’ while over at the Kansas City Star rugby ‘pretty much looks like a group mugging.’
Over here, though, everything will be different. We know what rugby is supposed to look like.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen Invictus and rugby doesn’t look like this. As with any sporting setback, it’s not fair to place all the blame on the captain. Matt Damon isn’t given much of a team. His stand-in Springboks look like college boys, though not necessarily students of acting, and their emotional range is limited even for rugby players. They sometimes cross their arms to express indignation.
These are pat-a-cake Springboks led by mini-Matt Damon and they will never win the Webb-Ellis Trophy. In that sense, the casting is perfect for the formula – Nelson can lick the boys into shape. If they follow his crazy reconciling ways, then one day, perhaps at a World Cup on home soil, they will ultimately prevail.
 The Anxiety of Influence Eastwood, too, is in the business of addressing hearts and not brains. Mandela is a complicated man in a troublesome country, but as with the rugby it’s easier to keep things simple. The Mandela bio-pic soon becomes a plot-standard sports movie: he’s black, he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but can kindly ex-con Nelson Mandela inspire a bunch of undersized students to become Rugby Champions of the World?
Maybe he can, if these actor Boks show they know their rugby. I certainly hadn’t written them off in advance, especially as in America Invictus was rated PG 13, for ‘brutal sport action’.
Which is exactly what rugby should provide, when played properly. By ‘properly’, I mean as we’re used to seeing it on TV, most of the weeks of the year. To capture the full dynamism and grace of the game, and also the brutality, TV sticks to the basics. High-spec cameras follow the action.
In Invictus, because the players aren’t a patch on the real thing, the camera does exactly the opposite. It obscures the action. Eastwood keeps cutting away, and no single sporting sequence is allowed to develop.
I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.
That’s my Pavlovian TV-spectator response to unusual sports phenomena, a category that includes all the rugby in this film. I want Eddie Butler to explain why the wingers don’t sprint and the Samoans are weak in defence. Is it the altitude? Have the All Blacks been poisoned? And why has Andrew Mehrtens appeared in a World Cup final wearing an Andrew Mehrtens wig?
Instead of this sense of involvement, I gradually realise I’m watching the one activity on earth that is as far from real life as it’s possible to get: the rugby looks like amateur dramatics.
And in Invictus there’s no escape, because the ‘95 Final is shown at length, almost thirty minutes of ersatz rugby action. The fearsome Jonah Lomu is replaced by a slightly chubby student. He is occasionally jumped on by other students, but before we can assess his contact skills the camera cuts to another unrelated set-up. There are scuffed kick-offs and elementary back-moves, all performed at rehearsal pace so as not to confuse Wisconsin.
Eastwood knows something is wrong. How could entire nations be in thrall to this? He therefore decides that the fervour of rugby is best expressed by sound-effects.
 Springbok Back Line In Invictus, the major injury risk to the players is earache. Every tackle boofs like a blunt object thumped into stuffed leather, and out comes the stuffing as grunts and oomphs. This is the aural equivalent of the Batman biff and boom.
Just when the rugby can’t get any worse, the match goes slow-mo. On television, slow-motion exists to repeat the interesting bits. In feature films, it means the emotional heft is so weighty that time stands still. Or feels like it does.
As the action slows, so does the sound. Ellis Park fills with whale-song, as the groans wallow deeply from one amateur tackle to the next. The Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky, who isn’t Stransky and who has forgotten his kicking boots, is calling for the ball in slow-audio, an unintelligible last word direct from a Hollywood battlefield, possibly Iwo Jima, and I expect him at any moment to receive (tragically) a solitary bullet between the eyes.
Instead he pops over a drop goal.
Clint gives rugby the fatal Hollywood treatment. In doing so, he undermines his film about Nelson Mandela, the nature of leadership, and the new South Africa.
In the best Hollywood sports films, usually about baseball or boxing, the protagonists are allowed to be grown men. Their lives depend upon their sport. The 1995 Springboks were also men, much closer to the flawed and grizzled heroes of Eastwood’s earlier work than they are to the college-boys of Invictus. They were playing for their old life and their new life, and also for themselves.
It does the truth of the story a disservice to insist, less than fifteen years after the event, that Mandela and the Boks can be simplified to serve the narrative conventions of this film. The rugby is central to this weakness. It becomes apparent long before the end that the epiphany of Invictus depends on the Springboks winning the Cup.
South Africa win. The film ends, and as choral arrangements squeeze the last sentimental tear from any dry eye, the credits roll against a montage of still photographs from the final. The real one.
There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the great man himself, at Ellis Park before kick-off. He is famously wearing the No.6 Springbok jersey, in green-and-gold, and he looks tiny against the blonde Afrikaaner bulk of Pienaar, the man he called ‘captain of rugby’. Anyone genuinely inspired by Nelson Mandela, and indeed by the game of rugby itself, will know that the triumph would have been as great if South Africa had lost.
 'there are no winners' As a sportsman, I am a member of the ‘ -y’ family. I’m related to Straussy and Backy. In our small sub-species, Homo Olympiens, there are three primary families. We are joined by the ‘-o’ family (Wilko, Johnno) and the ‘-ers’ family (Aggers, Athers).
We get along famously, because these sporting nicknames are names stripped down. They are names in the dressing room in their jockstraps. They’re no respecters of names. On the team-sheet nobody escapes – the system is automatic and egalitarian, and amid the mud and studs everyone is quickly allocated to one of the families.
The same does not happen in individual sports. One of the horrors of golf coverage on the TV is the smarmy use of first names – ‘Tiger’, ‘Lee’ – as if everyone was on first name terms. You’re not fooling anybody.
I’m thinking about this because I was surprised to be referred to on the net as Beardy. Over on his excellent blog designed for auto-didact, spliffy, anti-establishment ranting polymaths (who like trains), Ian Marchant reminded me (and all those in his wide constituency) that I’d offered to take the Physical Education Classes at the Free University of Radnorshire.
(This will be free like the National Gallery and not like Westminster Abbey, which is free except if you don’t pay you can’t go in. At the National Gallery there’s no bullying, and you’d have to have a heart of socialist stone not to bung a few coins in the tin or pay a couple of quid for some overpriced postcards).
But Ian is right. I have put myself forward as the Professor of PE at FUR. He was therefore correct to give me my active sporting name, and you know what, Marchers? That’s going to be the first class we take, before preparing for the more philosophical Race With No Finish Line (practical).
What are team nicknames all about? They announce an intimacy. They also infantilise, which makes them true. Those of us who like games and rolling about on grass are in touch with our inner child. A baby name is the best we deserve, and there is no room for airs and graces.
I was reminded of this once in the letter pages of the Times. A show-off Dad proudly wrote in to say that his eight-month old son was a keen fan of BBC’s Test Match Special. Not only did he like to listen to every ball of a Test match, at the age of eight months, but only the day before he’d uttered his first words: ‘Aggers.’
The next day another reader replied that his son, too, was eight months old and listened to every ball of the Test match. His first words were ‘Christoper Martin-Jenkins.’
 'mental about fighting' I was reminded about this because I was thinking about the translator Marie Rennard, who came up with the title Le Rugbyman Nomade. In French, ‘le rugbyman’ is a commonly used term for those lucky souls with a passion for the sport of rugby. However, it means more than that, just as ‘le cricketman’ would be someone with more than a casual interest in cricket. ‘Le rugbyman’ is a rugby nutter. He’s mental about rugby. This is because the ‘man’ in ‘le rugbyman’ comes from the wide-eyed man in maniac.
I’ve always liked this false-friend aspect of ‘Le Rugbyman’, as if everyone who plays rugby is indeed a superhero, with a big R in a shield across the front of his stripey jersey. Bird, Plane, Rugbyman – Dru could draw this in her sleep.
Knowing that the man comes from the maniac has wider consequences when the French meet our English-language superheroes. I mean the real ones.
Spiderman, pronounced Speederrhhman, is a confused newspaper reporter who is mental about spiders. Superman is a general, all-round, 24-hour basket-case – Supermaniac. He is the maniac above all others. Either that, or he just loves everything that’s super. He’s the original Hero of Super, a Superhero.
Batman gets a double misunderstanding, but barely suffers (he’s superhuman) in translation. Small French boys love Batman, but not because he has a friend called Robin or was bitten by a bat as a child. They’re immediate fans because here they have a superhero, just like them, who loves to ‘battre’. He’s Batman, a maniac about fighting, which about sums him up.
Language. What a Marvel.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and recently took up the post as Director of the National Academy of Writing. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed aboved. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below right. I'll get back to you.
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