An Irishman's Diary

Can nothing at all be done to halt the spread of golf? There was a while there when I had high hopes for global warming, which seemed to have drastic implications for the many courses located along coastlines. "Links" golf is regarded as the soul of the sport. If the melting ice-caps succeeded it making it extinct, I thought, the loss of the polar bears would not seem so crushing.

But no sooner do the rising seas give cause for optimism than the front line shifts again and golf advances in a different direction.

First this year came the success of the Ryder Cup in Smurfland, the small, semi-autonomous principality west of Dublin. The decision to hold the competition at the K Club, rather than on a typically European links course, was initially controversial. Many critics seemed to be under the impression that the event was being held in neighbouring Ireland, and did not realise that the actual host country was landlocked.

It is the Smurfish people's misfortune that for all their wealth and influence, the principality has no access to the sea (and is thus forced to moors its yachts in Monte Carlo and such places). Of course this did not perturb the commercially minded Ryder Cup people, or they would have chosen a course on mainland Hibernia instead. And in the event, Smurfland's globally acknowledged triumph pointed the future direction for golf (i.e. inland) should global warming do its worst.

Even the success of the Ryder Cup pales, however, alongside the sport's latest milestone: the news that, for an undisclosed sum, a Canadian golf club maker has persuaded a cosmonaut to hit a golf ball off a specially designed tee on the International Space Station.

The stunt was for an advertisement, naturally, which had less to do with the advancement of science than with allowing the club makers to claim the longest drive in history. But the station needed the money. And after determining that the golf-ball could come do no harm, provided it was propelled backwards off the station, NASA gave its blessing. The cosmonaut launched his tee-shot last week.

The depressing thing is that, like the ball (which, despite being shanked, was expected to make 48 orbits of the earth before burning up in the atmosphere), the exploitation of space by golf will not stop there. We know two things about the coming generation of "space tourists": (a) they will have money; and (b) they will have too much time on their hands. It follows, almost certainly, that they will be golfers.

How long can it be before one of these wants to beat the distance record? How long before the cash-strapped space station goes the whole hog and builds a driving range on the back of the ship? Longer-term ambitions for golfers will surely include the first black-hole-in-one. Presumably designers at Pringle are already working on a v-neck spacesuit with colourful patterns.

Golfing in space is not new. The shape of things to come was visible as long ago as 1971, when Alan Shepard became the first man to bit a golf ball on the moon, using equipment he had smuggled aboard the spacecraft. Since then the moon has been an underdeveloped resource, golf-wise. But no doubt the age of space tourism will rectify that.

What price a Tiger Woods-designed links course on the Sea of Tranquillity, with a giant Nike logo, visible from the earth? One thinks of poor Hal, the doomed super-computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. He clearly saw all this coming and tried to nip it in the bud by murdering all the humans on his spacecraft - golfers to a man, you could tell - to save the universe from infection. Sadly, one survived to disconnect his memory: a process that culminates in the chilling scene where Hal reverts to computer childhood and delivers a dying performance (unplugged) of "Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do".

I felt like joining him in a duet when I heard the news, back on earth, that Donald Trump is bringing his golf-property empire across the Atlantic. Even global warming seems to have been a false hope, judging by the tycoon's decision to invest £1 billion on a seaside development in Scotland which, with characteristic modesty, he predicts will be "the greatest golf course anywhere in the world".

Trump has an estimated 60 per cent of America's known reserves of vulgarity. His crassness is such that he has succeeded in making his own hair look like a wig. But nobody would accuse him of lacking shrewdness. If he is prepared to invest that much money in beachfront, Al Gore must be exaggerating.

Trump's Scottish plan is partly inspired by the fact that his mother was born on the Isle of Lewis. It is, however, all too likely that he has an Irish ancestor too, and even if he hasn't thought of the idea yet, the Donal O'Trump Sodom and Begorrah golf resort is probably now inevitable.

At any rate, the outlook is bleak for those of us who hate the game. We now know that, from the Irish midlands to outer space, nowhere is safe.