Golf

Why women’s golf is better than men’s

21 September 2024 9:00 am

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?

18 May 2024 9:00 am

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

2 December 2023 9:00 am

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?

30 September 2023 9:00 am

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

15 May 2022 4:00 pm

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

9 April 2022 9:00 am

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

12 February 2022 9:00 am

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

2 October 2021 9:00 am

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

21 August 2021 9:00 am

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

15 May 2021 9:00 am

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

20 March 2021 9:00 am

An open letter to my golf club

Sporting spectacles to look forward to in lockdown

7 November 2020 9:00 am

‘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

7 November 2020 9:00 am

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

26 September 2020 9:00 am

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

6 October 2018 9:00 am

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

7 April 2018 9:00 am

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

21 May 2016 9:00 am

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

20 February 2016 9:00 am

No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn

The secret life of Sir John Major

23 January 2016 9:00 am

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

25 July 2015 9:00 am

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

27 June 2015 9:00 am

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

4 April 2015 9:00 am

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

14 February 2015 9:00 am

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

9 August 2014 9:00 am

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)

26 July 2014 9:00 am

Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or for that matter, bring joy. You…