Trump wants golf back and the game plays up its advantage - privilege

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2020/apr/21/donald-trump-wants-golf-back-pga-tour-coronavirus-pandemic

Trump wants golf back and the game plays up its advantage – privilege

Andy Bull

Tue 21 Apr 2020 14.19 BST Last modified on Tue 21 Apr 2020 14.47 BST

Stephen Moore appeared on the Today Programme on Tuesday morning to talk about the US protests against the lockdown. Moore, who is a member of Donald Trump’s economic recovery taskforce, made headlines recently with his radioactively obnoxious opinion that the people out complaining about physical distancing are modern-day equivalents of Rosa Parks, a comparison that makes you wonder whether earplugs ought not to be considered an essential bit of PPE.

“People are protesting against their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights,” he told the BBC. “People in many states feel politicians are trampling on those rights.” It was, Moore said, especially tough in his own home state of Maryland “where they won’t even let you play golf by yourself”.

May God forgive the impingement on his unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of birdies. The absurdity of it is that when they come to write the history of these past few weeks they will have to set aside a couple of paragraphs to explain where the game of golf fitted into this mess, since Trump has spent so much time out on the course himself.

He seems to have played every other weekend since the crisis started, on 18 and 19 January, 1, 2 and 15 February, 7 and 8 March, this last round while thousands of people in quarantine on board the Grand Princess were stuck waiting to find out whether he would let them off or not.
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Trump, though, is pretty unashamed about where the game fits in his list of priorities. Especially now, when, like Jimmy Kimmel joked, phase one of his recovery plan seems to be to get the golf courses open again as soon as possible.

He had the commissioner of the PGA Tour, Jay Monahan, on the phone last weekend, in a conference call with other administrators, talking about how they would get sport up and running. “Our sport lends itself more so than any other sport to social distancing,” Monahan told CNN afterwards. “And I think that’s what puts us in a spot where we feel like we can return at that point in time. Golf is inherently unique in that regard.”

Monahan’s argument would have been stronger if he had said that his is one of few sports that might be improved by physical distancing, given some of the sorts who hang around the clubhouses. As it is, whether or not golf really “lends itself” to physical distancing or not depends on whether they will be able to find a way to protect the 800 or so officials and support staff it takes to run a PGA Tour event.

There have been reports that the PGA Tour has ordered as many as a million testing kits. Which speaks to the game’s real advantage, its privilege, most obvious in Trump’s offer “to provide a lot of help and resources”. So anyone flying back and forth for the tournaments will be doing it under the auspices of “essential travel”.
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