What IS GOLF?

Pada tahun 60 an masih ramai yang tidak tahu tentang permainan Golf sehingga telah dimasukkan dalam Sarawak Gazette.

" Golf is a form of work made expensive enough for a man to enjoy it. It is physical and mental exertion made attractive by the fact. that you have to dress for it in curiously coloured garments.

Golf is what letter carrying, ditch digging, and carpet beating would be if those three tasks had to be performed on the same hot afternoon in short pants and coloured socks by gouty looking gentlemen who require a different implement for every mood

(golf is the simplest looking game in the world when you decide to take it up, and the toughest after you leave been at it ten or twelve years. It is probably the only known game a man can play as long as a quarter of a century and then discover that it was too deep for him in the first place.

The game is played on carefully selected grass with little white balls and as many clubs as the player can afford. These little balls cost from 2/ d to 5/ d, and it is possible to support a family of ten 'people (all adults) for five months on the money represented bar the balls lost by some golfers in a single afternoon. A golf course has eighteen holes, seventeen of which are unnecessary and put in to make the game harder. A "hole" is a tin cup in the centre of a "green." A "green" is a small parcel of grass costing about 10/ d a blade and usually located between a brook and a couple of gum trees, or a lot of "unfinished excavation."

The idea is to get the golf ball from a given point into each of the eighteen cups in the fewest strokes and the greatest number of words. The ball must not be thrown, pushed or carried. It must be propelled by about X7_0 worth of curious looking implements, especially designed to provoke the owner. Each implement has a specific purpose, and ultimately some golfers get to know what that purpose is. They are exceptions.

After each hole has been completed the golfer counts his strokes. Then he subtracts six and sans, "Made that in five. That's one above par. Shall we play for drinks on the next hole, too, Ed')

After the final, or eighteenth hole, the golfer adds up his score and stops when he has reached eighty seven. He then has a shower, a pint of gin, sinks "Sweet Adeline" with six or eight other liars, and calls it the end of a perfect day"

British North Borneo Herald.

Sarawak Gazette, September 1939 pp.145