Golf
There’s nothing quite like the Ryder Cup
It’s never been easy to warm to golfers, an overpaid, self-obsessed bunch who rarely fail to ask for more. And…
The Donald and the art of golf diplomacy
In 1969, one of the great acts of sportsmanship occurred at Royal Birkdale golf club in Southport, when the Ryder…
The enigma of Tiger Woods
The Tiger Woods industry continues to flourish, but the man himself never now gives interviews, so any insights into his feelings are second-hand at best
Why women’s golf is better than men’s
In the exhilarating event of Somerset managing to sneak past Surrey and being on their way to claim their first…
Is pro-golf eating itself?
Spare a thought for Manchester United’s Erik ten Hag. He’s got a fairly crummy, injury-hit team who appear to have…
How sport helped shape the British character
David Horspool connects different sports to our historical experience: cricket with class, golf with property rights, tennis with female emancipation and boxing with ethnicity
Will the US catch the birdie?
At last the Ryder Cup is here – well, in Rome – and with it Europe’s biennial chance to stick…
Why Saudi Arabia is trying to take over the world of golf
Golf came to Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. American expats, working in the nascent oil industry, brought their clubs with…
Pep and Klopp, kings of England
It’s a game for the ages all right, City againstLiverpool on Sunday as the Premier League moves to its most…
Is football missing a trick?
Well, there’s a surprise: Nike have cancelled their sponsorship of the Manchester United and England footballer Mason Greenwood, who is…
England’s shameful betrayal of Pakistan
Any English person with a love of cricket knows life has its ups and downs. But until now we have…
There never was fair play
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Utopia or Pleasantville?
Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for…
Teed off
An open letter to my golf club
Sit back and enjoy the spectacle ahead
‘At least there’s sport,’ said the woman in the supermarket queue. True enough, and in a welcome sop to an…
From St Petersburg to St Andrews
Aneliya, the Russian narrator of David Keenan’s enjoyably weird new novel, is worried about her dad. Tomasz’s modest music career…
A scene with Harry and Son
José Mourinho, it was surprising to read, recently said how relieved he was that the Amazon Prime cameras were out…
Teamwork? It’s not the American way, even in the Ryder cup
For a nation which gave us a brilliant TV show called Band of Brothers, the Americans find it hard to…
Cricket’s ball-tampering scandal has been nothing but a tearful pantomime
I haven’t seen so many men crying since the end of A Tale of Two Cities at the Scala Cinema…
Jeeves and the Cap that Fits
A story about Bertie Wooster and a man called The Donald, with apologies to P.G. Wodehouse
Left without pleasures
No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn
Low life
Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000…
Australia’s comeback kids
I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give…
Tiger, Tiger, burning out
A car crash is a terrible thing, but hordes of people still slow down to cop an eyeful on the…
Can McIlroy become the magnificent seventh?
The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors…
