I am OK with golf. Played it more when I was in high school. Have a set of clubs and the requisite shoes even though I rarely use them but even now prefer going to the range, because even a bucket of balls for me is an extravagance. The only benefit that came from “a good walk spoiled” was the free green fees available from my first full-time professional job. No such benefits have come since. I may hit some whiffle balls in the back yard when the weather warms up even though I probably will have to deal with mom? gardening.
If you’ve read some of my recent stuff you know my issues with Trump’s golf vacations and it could all come to a head this coming week. Unlike Nixon and table-tennis policy in China, Trump could actually cause an international incident but perhaps the PRC noticed his stupidity with Angela Merkel and his demand for NATO back payments. And for Trump it’s really about his investments like his hotel project(s).
Who knows with the orange master of randomness, since he could strike a class blow for golfers as well as his own golf courses with some boorishness. Perhaps he’ll try to get President Xi who doesn’t play golf, to watch him play, much like Trump wants Queen Elizabeth to watch him play at Balmoral that only shows how viewing amateurs playing golf is like watching paint dry.
But there are so many things to provoke an international incident, especially since he’s trying to cover-up his Russian problems. Then again his staff is probably unconcerned how a sport associated with corruption and unofficial deals in one country might be seen in another.
When Shinzo Abe flew to Mar-a-Lago earlier this month to meet Donald Trump, the Japanese prime minister presented the U.S. president with a suitably ostentatious gold-plated golf club worth almost $4,000. The leaders played a round while chatting policy and business.
However, when Chinese President Xi Jinping turns up for meetings on April 6, Trump would do well not to offer him a golf club.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has cracked down on the genteel sport in what commentators have dubbed a “war on golf.” The sport has a contentious history in the country: Mao Tse-tung, founder of Communist China, described golf as a “sport for millionaires” and golf was banned until the mid-1980s.
Though building courses was technically banned in 2004, the sport flourished—until Xi Jinping jumped on the anti-golf bandwagon and closed them in their hundreds.
Many party officials at local level play golf in China, which has angered many who see it as a sport for the wealthy in a country where there is also extreme poverty.
The Chinese Communist Party banned its 88 million members from playing golf in 2015, due to its association with corruption and unofficial deals being made on the fairways.
Though the ban was revoked in 2016, Xi Jinping told cadres they were forbidden from receiving golf memberships as gifts as part of his efforts to reduce corruption among more junior party officials.
With dozens of US military bases encircling China with a “giant noose,” and America’s historic nuclear presence in the Pacific region, a war between the greatest military power and the world’s second largest economy “is no longer unthinkable,” journalist John Pilger says.
Halfway house food
Best Golf Course Food
Olympic Club, San Francisco
With Hollywood types, some hyperbole is to be expected. It's one thing for Justin Timberlake to declare the venerated burger dog served at San Francisco's Olympic Club as the best burger he has ever eaten.
But the hamburger shaped to fit a hot-dog bun has become a part of the 156-year-old club's landscape—literally.
Originally created by Bill Parrish for his Hot Dog Bills stand outside the club's Lake Course, the sandwich became so popular with players stepping across the street for a food break that Olympic asked Parrish to move the stand inside the grounds to serve as the halfway house. Bill's daughter, Candy, took over the operation in the 1980s.
Today, she, her husband, Jack, and her two sons, Max and Grahm, oversee three stands across Olympic's 45 holes and practice range and cook up roughly 200 burger dogs each day for lucky members and guests.
The star of the show hasn't changed a lick since the beginning: a quarter pound of ground chuck (85 percent lean) formed into an oblong patty, cooked medium rare and topped with cheese, red relish, mustard, dill pickles and onions.
Parrish isn't possessive of the burger dog's secrets: The recipe is on the Hot Dog Bills website, and she'll even sell you a plastic mold to get the torpedo shape just right. "It's a good grind of meat, a really hot grill and some salt and pepper," Parrish says. "And the bun? It has to be toasted."