The golf pro asked me to step outside, his face dour. This was particularly distressing because he is usually so jovial. Happy to play and teach golf for a living. He’s really good too. Like play on the Senior Tour good.
When we got outside of the clubhouse, he informed me that I had been reported two separate times for infractions—boring golf infractions that I’m not sure I even did. But his demeanor and the weight he gave the words hurt me. I am a people-pleaser and a rule-follower, and so I apologized and swore I didn’t think it happened and I would make sure it would never happen again.
Then when I left, I got angry. What kind of grade school tattling was that? I angrily said to myself.
But what did I expect?
One of the internet’s favorite things to do is make fun of golf and golfers, and they absolutely deserve it. I am not the only Middle East expert and golf lover, but I hope my takes are a little less embarrassing. There are also too many examples to count of golfers being jerks and whiners. Here’s just one egregious example.
But beyond the fact that writing, liking, and even playing golf is rightly associated with privileged white men yelling at clouds and telling everyone else how to feel, golf can be actively harmful. Golf courses, especially near urban areas, are privatized pieces of precious land that could be used for other more beneficial purposes. Also, golf’s history is intimately tied to colonialism and white supremacy.
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There is some evidence, in the tomb of Kheti, of a golf-like game that was played in Dynastic Egypt
In Kheti’s tomb young men are shown playing a hockey-like game, controlling what appears to be a small wooden hoop with bent-ended sticks. . . . It is not certain whether this ‘hoop’ should be interpreted as a hoop, a disk or a solid ball.
Lane Demas, Game of Privilege p. 33
Yet that tangential history is outweighed by the history of the modern game which is linked tightly to colonialism.
“May the best man win” was a common sentiment in imperial Britain and the Empire, but this was not simply a paean to fair play and clean sport. It was also an expression of a worldview which held that participation in and success at athletic endeavors were primary measures of the worth of a man as a man. Games playing as defined by English rules and standards set the British and their subjects apart from effeminate continental Europeans, subjugated Africans, and effete Asians, and provided a forum for intra-imperial communication between the metropolitan center in England and the colonial periphery, as well as between peripheral nations themselves.
Patrick McDevitt, May the Best Man Win p.2
It’s not coincidental that former British Prime Minister and writer of the eponymous Balfour Declaration, Arthur Balfour, loved golf.
In addition his remarkable social eminence, the breadth of his [Balfour’s] learning and wit-he could write on such varied subjects as Bergson, Handel, theism, and golf
Edward Said, Orientalism p.31
So fervent was his love of golf that he was the target of a classic, and very true, political attack, that he cared more about golf than governing.
The imbrication of colonialism and golf is clear in the colonization of Egypt. Upon the British arrival in 1882, “officers of the Army of Occupation, who complained about having nowhere in Cairo to play polo,” would request and be given a tract of land to establish the Khedival Sporting Club (Oppenheim, “Gezira” p.552). Very soon it would have an 18-hole golf course.
The club was and would be heavily tied to the British Occupation forces
Until 1914, the general commanding the British Army of Occupation was the club's president, thus highlighting the role the military played in the institutions of the resident British community. The strategic demands of World War I, and the vastly expanded military presence (with Egypt having been declared a protectorate following the Ottoman declaration of war), saw the appointment of the British High Commissioner as president and the British commanding general as vice-president. As late as 1951, the British ambassador in Cairo was still the president of the club.
Oppenheim, “Gezira” p.553
The local bourgeoisie and elite, as part of their nationalist reaction to colonialism, believed that by beating the British at their own game, that is establishing a healthy and vibrant Egyptian masculine body politic able to compete in the colonial games, would lead the country to self-determination and freedom. And so, in 1909, they founded Nadi al-Ahly and then several other clubs, all meant to make Egyptian men, mostly privileged, strong and ready to compete with the Brits.1
It was this elite commitment to athletics that made the men in my family deeply committed to sport. My grandfather was, like many Egyptians, a diehard fan of Nadi al-Ahly and he passed this on to my father, who also participated in many sports at the Gezira Sporting Club (The name of the Khedival Sporting Club after 1915). My father passed that love to me. Sport is a major way that I and my father communicate and spend time together. I remember playing golf at the Gezira Club, sweating through our polos, and him telling me that his father, also named Omar Foda, used to say that doing anything in hot weather was for “mad-dogs and Englishmen.” The only two groups crazy enough to ignore the heat. It was also on that golf course that I learned about the privileged life of my grandfather, the son of one of Egypt’s largest landholders.
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Hassan Hassanein was born in 1916 in Cairo. The world and Egypt were still embroiled in the Great War, the War to end all Wars, the war that ended nothing. He was roughly contemporaneous with my grandfather, but I’m sure they did not know each other. He was not from the same elite.
Hassan would become familiar with golf as a caddy on the course for the Heliopolis Sport Club. The club was founded in 1910 by Cairo Electric Railways & Heliopolis Oases Company a partnership between Belgian developers and Boghos Nubar Pasha.
British Open champion, Max Faulkner, said this about Hassan Hassanein’s swing:
learnt on sand in bare feet and so needed wonderful balance to stop his feet sliding when he swung. His feet hardly moved, and his heels remained very close to the ground. ... His swing was a treat to watch.
How much of this was Max Faulkner’s Orientalist imagination of Egypt and how much reflected the Heliopolis course, we can’t know because the club stopped offering golf when maintenance became too costly in 1947. [I will say that whenever I tell people I played golf in Egypt they can’t help but make the same joke about sand traps.] What we can surmise is that Hassan Hassanein’s swing was pieced together during practice between caddying.
Caddying was a well-worn entry point for those typically excluded from the game by money or by race.
Many of the first U.S. clubs considered it an especially suitable endeavor for black boys, and within twenty years the image of the black child as caddie was firmly entrenched in American popular culture.
Lane Demas, Game of Privilege p.52
While it was a service position, there was agency for the caddy on the golf course. The caddy was not meant to be silent, but could serve as an expert on the course, a source of advice on swings and putts, and even comic relief when things went awry. This is not to mention the fact that a caddy could establish connections usually reserved for peers at a golf club. In fact, there are ample records of men of privilege like John D. Rockefeller interacting with black boys serving as their caddies. And in a caddies’ downtime they could mess around with clubs and build their own golf game.
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Adma’s calls were like clockwork. Every Saturday at 7am, he would call and call and call. I once let it ring, and he persisted until 8:30, when I finally picked up and conceded. The first thing he said was always, “Mister Omar, are you coming?” His calls were a weekly alarm to get me to the Gezira Club to play golf before it got too hot to do anything but breathe. But there were not a few times that I cursed his regularity and poor phone etiquette. I thought golf was supposed to be relaxing. There was a very good reason he called me, I tipped well and generally tried not to be too demanding. Adma, “Bone” in Arabic, was my caddy at the Gezira Club, and he was a damn good one. He told me things I need to hear, how to play what shot, never lost a ball, could hit it dead straight with his self-taught swing, and was a funny guy (dammu khafif as they say in Arabic). He humored my broken Arabic and taught me stuff that my father or teachers would never.
Class permeates everything in Egypt, especially among the elite that I easily slid into when I spent time there. This is not some shocking revelation, anyone with any awareness of Egypt would know my status by the mere fact I played golf in Egypt. The number of golfers in Egypt is vanishingly small, in the tens of thousands in a country of more than 100 million, and the overwhelming majority are from the upper-class.
Among the elite, when it comes to language, Arabic sits third behind French and English. They use it, of course, but they wouldn't be caught using street Arabic, the stuff that Adma specialized in, unless they were joking or ridiculing someone. And it was so very American of me to pretend that class didn't exist as I paid a man to carry around my golf clubs in a private club in downtown Cairo as he gave me lessons on a life I would never live. I was young, but not dumb enough to be unaware of the social dynamics. I never imagined I was getting a real Egypt, that I could somehow extrapolate from our conversations the key to understanding the Middle East. I just really enjoyed playing golf with him and talking to him about serious things and not serious things, and even letting him hit with my clubs.
But there are limits to the pathways open to a caddy.
Danny Noonan [Caddying for Judge Smalls]: I planned to go to law school after I graduated, but it looks like my folks won't have enough money to put me through college.
Judge Smalls: Well, the world needs ditch-diggers too
Caddyshack, 1980
Adma would occasionally ask me to give him old pairs of shoes or other clothes and I never did. He was about six inches shorter than me and wore shoes at least three sizes smaller. They would never fit, I told myself. But when my grandmother found out, she was upset that Adma would ask for such things, he was violating an unspoken protocol. And maybe I was aware of that too.
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Hassan Hassanein made expert use of the opportunities that caddying, and golf gave him. He committed himself fully to the game in the 1930s and by the end of World War II was winning local tournaments and was the head golf professional at the Gezira Club. His appointment was part of a larger Egyptianization trend, where companies and organizations, in response to a more assertive and nationalistic government, tried to provide more positions to Egyptians, although they usually went to the highly connected.
Hassanein won tournaments in Egypt, competing against locals and Europeans and he even competed and won in Europe. He won the Italian Open in 1949 and the France Open in 1951. He also represented Egypt twice in the Golf World Cup.
But even he ran into golf’s commitment to white supremacy. The man called “Egypt’s Sam Snead” only played three times in America, all at the All American Open, a tournament run by a private businessman who could invite whoever he wanted. The businessman’s prerogative was important because in the PGA’s eyes Hassanein was black and their tour was segregated.
The ties between white supremacy, patriarchy, and golf have remained strong, especially in America, with the former president Donald Trump being the clearest example of this. He was unapologetically a white supremacist, a misogynist, and a golfer. Nothing more needs to be said about his presidency, other than the fact that golf, and his private Trump golf clubs, were inextricably linked to his time in office. Mar-A-Lago, a golf club, even became his unofficial presidential residence, and membership there became a way to try to gain influence on American politics. Not for nothing, he also is a golf cheat.
It is no wonder that even with the impact of Tiger Woods, people of color in America don't play golf and when they do, they find it unwelcoming. Citing infractions is a well-established way to make people of color feel unwanted on a golf course. And that brings me back to my infractions, which might have just been someone not liking the way I handled myself on the course. Or they might have been because of my name. I can’t say either way, but the idea of them being something more insidious popped into my head after I had spent a day replaying my conversation with the pro over and over.
It made me sympathize with Gamal Abdel Nasser who, as part of his Arab socialistic program, nationalized the Gezira Club and turned 9 holes of the 18-hole Gezira course into football fields. Showed those guys!
My father would tell me about Nasser’s irresponsible nationalizations when we played golf, part of his larger discussion of how Nasser ruined the country. He, of course, had a rooting interest as Nasser’s government nationalized a great deal of his grandfather’s land and sent him to an early grave, confiscated all of his uncle’s assets and put him under arrest, and made my grandfather’s life very difficult. And when I played with him, I couldn’t help but view the Gezira Club through that lens, seeing everything as a shabby remnant of a better era. Then I started going by myself and came to appreciate its beauty and the privilege I had. The difference between the nostalgic image that lives in many Egyptians’ minds and the current club is the difference between offensive opulence and just regular wealth.
The end of the Gezira Club’s 18-hole tournament course in 1952 was followed by the death of Hassan Hassanein in 1957. Egypt’s greatest golfer was taken in a horrific home accident at 40. Who knows how things would have gone if Egypt’s greatest golfer remained a presence? Golf’s place probably would be like what it is now, but it could have been something different. At the very least he would be more well-known.
I only became aware of his story after I went looking for something, anything that would make me not feel so bad about playing golf. At one point, I swore up and I down I would never play golf again, but I very quickly made myself a hypocrite. I should’ve known. There is something about the game, the frequent failure and struggling to cope with it, that fits with my brain. The golf course also he’d special power over me as it was the classroom where I learned about my grandfather, and other family members, who died before I could make memories of them. And, of course, golf is something I have shared with my dad for years.
Even still, I had a hard time ignoring the many faults of the game and the people who played it, so I did what I always do when the present weighs too heavy, I looked backwards. For me, the great gift of history is the realization that things have not always been this way and, often without warning, things can change drastically.
I’m glad I found Hassan Hassanein’s story. I, of course, wish there was more to it and I may yet find some. But it didn’t make me feel better about playing golf. How could it? It’s one counterexample in a long, racist history. But it did make me feel just a little less strange finding joy in a very problematic game.