Golf
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 the Ryder Cup?
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…
Mason Greenwood and football’s obsession with prodigies
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…
Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
A window on a fascinatingly weird place: Some Kind of Heaven reviewed
Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for…
An open letter to my golf club
An open letter to my golf club
Sporting spectacles to look forward to in lockdown
‘At least there’s sport,’ said the woman in the supermarket queue. True enough, and in a welcome sop to an…
Short and sweet: Xstabeth, by David Keenan, reviewed
Aneliya, the Russian narrator of David Keenan’s enjoyably weird new novel, is worried about her dad. Tomasz’s modest music career…
DeChambeau’s the one to watch in the Masters
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 a Man called The Donald
A story about Bertie Wooster and a man called The Donald, with apologies to P.G. Wodehouse
No golf, no bridge, scared of champagne – it’s tough being a leftie
No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn
The secret life of Sir John Major
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 amazing, exhausting sporting comebacks
I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give…
The twilight of Tiger Woods
A car crash is a terrible thing, but hordes of people still slow down to cop an eyeful on the…
Rory McIlroy and the grandest prize in golf
The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors…
The amazing story of the blind photographer
Perhaps the news that Radio 5 live will be the only BBC station (under the new broadcasting rights agreements) to…
Why squash deserves a place in the Olympics
Thank god for the Commonwealth Games: at least they gave us a brief respite from football transfer stories. Instead of…
Simon Barnes’s diary: A sportswriter is never without a big subject (unless it’s golf)
Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or for that matter, bring joy. You…
Don’t blame ministers for the Royal Mail sell-off. Beat up the bankers!
Vince Cable and Michael Fallon, ministers responsible for the Royal Mail sell-off, have been summoned for another select committee grilling…
Five reasons to be cheerful about British sport (yes, even the cricket)
James Cook’s third voyage as an English captain ended in disaster, stabbed to death and disembowelled by a pack of…
