Of all the tributes to the late Robin Williams that have poured in during the past twenty-four hours, a couple of tweets in particular caught my eye, both of them by prominent golfers. The first was by Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irish boy wonder who just won his fourth major championship, and the tweet read like it may have been composed by a P.R. person: “RIP Robin Williams…. He brought joy to so many people all over the world, will be fondly remembered and sadly missed.” The second, from Gary Player, the legendary South African who won nine majors, was a bit more personal, and it included a couple of famous lines from “Dead Poets Society”: “RIP. Robin Williams. Oh Captain, my Captain. Carpe Diem. You will be missed.”
That’s for sure. But the tweets got me thinking about whether these golfers, and the millions of lesser hackers who are mourning the loss of Williams, know that he is responsible for what is probably the funniest, and the most profane, peroration on the sport that anybody has ever delivered. Many students of golf literature—yes, there is such a thing—consider P. G. Wodehouse’s gentle stories featuring Archibald Mealing (“one of those golfers whose desire outruns performance”), the Oldest Member, and other golfers, to be the pinnacle of links humor. (Back in the nineties, these stories were collected in a book called “The Golf Omnibus,” a copy of which I have just taken down from a shelf.) But Wodehouse, despite his inimitable (and yet often imitated) prose style, had nothing on Williams in full flow, as he was in July, 2002, when he performed a Grammy-winning one-man show.
In some circles, Williams’s golf bit is considered a cult classic. A clip of it on YouTube has been viewed more than seven million times. On Tuesday, Golf Digest posted a link to the clip. So did Business Insider.
I won’t spoil the fun or run the gauntlet of our arbiters of good taste by providing a full transcript. (Though you may do well to read one once you’ve stopped laughing.) Suffice to say that, in just under five minutes, Williams manages to send up almost everyone and everything associated with the sport: the Scots who invented it (“You realize how drunk they get, they could wear a skirt and not care!”); the out-of-shape lunks who play it (“It’s such an athletic sport: whack the ball, get in the car; whack the ball, get in the car”); the hideous outfits that it inspires (“Even the alligator’s going, ‘Asshole’ ”); and the hushed tones of its television commentators (“Could people be quieter? I’d like to hear the grass grow”).
And, yes, Williams also did what had to be done, skewering the racist country-club mentality with which the sport has long been associated. Aping the archetypal tight-lipped über-Wasp’s response to the rise of Tiger Woods, he howls, “My God, we’re doomed! How did he learn to play? We wouldn’t have let him join.”
Unlike many Hollywood actors, he doesn’t appear to have played the sport in any serious way. Certainly, he never appeared at the A. T. & T. Celebrity Classic, which draws the likes of Bill Murray and Clint Eastwood. Perhaps that’s not surprising. If the organizers of the annual shindig at Pebble Beach had seen Williams’s video, they would probably have locked the gates to him.
Yet, for all of its association with social and economic privilege, golf is an excellent outlet for obsessives, and it provides a safe venue for the affluent unhinged to exorcise their demons. That probably explains why Alice Cooper and numerous other sobered-up celebrities are so keen on the sport.
Williams clearly understood the sport’s essential nature, which is frustration. In part of his skit, which Business Insider referred to as “the gold standard for making fun of golf,” he channels the foul-mouthed Scottish sadist who invented the game:
As McIlroy and Player said, the absence of Williams will be felt by many—including those of us wearing baggy pink Bermuda shorts and wielding tire irons.
