The most American sport of all: Golf.

Yes, golf, the badly dressed game of rhetorical virtue.

If I asked you to name our national sport, you’d say football, baseball, or basketball, am I right? So, what’s with my pitch for golf?

Bear with me. I’m offering an instructive lesson in the persuasive art of rhetoric—particularly the tricky, misunderstood tool of virtue. Master it, and you master America. Or golfers at least.

Football’s American status is obvious. Its plays—“violence punctuated by committee meetings,” as George Will put it—capture the essence of our country’s character. The Superbowl halftime throws in our mastery of the floor show. Plus, no other nation really plays the sport; anything that bores or disgusts the rest of the world proves our exceptionalism.¹

Baseball: It’s “America’s pastime,” with an emphasis on “past.” Latin Americans show a far greater love for the sport than U.S. Americans. But it remains our sport in the sense that it indulges our compulsive yearning for yesteryear. We’re a nation of nostalgists.

Basketball: While football and baseball simply added hands to soccer and bases to cricket, with basketball we appropriated no other sport, instead relying on sheer American ingenuity. Then it spread around the world, becoming the Coca-Cola of sports. What’s even more American, basketball favors the freakishly glandular. America is a nation of extremophiles. We breed X-Men, Red Bulls, butt-lifted influencers and bazillionaires. Our dials go to eleven. Our towering stars shoot three-pointers like trebuchets assaulting fortresses.²

And still I argue that golf is the USA-est of them all. Why?

For one thing, it’s the only sport other than car racing that involves driving. Golf is no longer a “good walk spoiled,” as the expression goes. For most golfers it isn’t a walk at all. It’s a ride punctuated by attacks on a ball. What’s more American than that? Plus…

Some years ago, I went on a corporate retreat at a golf resort. While bouncing around the course in a golf cart (super fun!), I discovered a built-in beer cooler. Only bass fishing, another star-spangled sport, would consider beer to be essential gear. So American! Also…

The courses themselves capture our national passion for transforming landscapes. In our quest to domesticate the Scottish link, we turned vast stretches of stark desert into Caledonia. Leaving aside the environmental consequences, it’s positively breathtaking to come across buzzed mid-desert greenswards with “hazards” ingeniously sucked from deep aquifers. This is what we do, we turn wilderness into Eden and damn the collateral damage. Object all you want—and believe me, I object fervently—but you can’t say this triumph of the manufactured Edenic dream isn’t essentially American.

Still, neither the driving nor the landscaping truly makes golf our most American pastime. Consider the sport critically, and you shove a catheter up the beating heart of our culture and politics. There lies the best and worst of our tribally split, beloved country. It’s where you find virtue, the rhetorical exploitation of group myths and values.

There’s something classy and grownup about golf, which is why I don’t play it. Despite the taxpayer-funded public courses, golf is our most class-conscious sport.³ It’s the pastime of presidents; both Obama and Trump play. Zeppelin-bodied William Howard Taft played. All but 3 of the 18 presidents who succeeded Taft have been golfers.⁴

Basketball stars take up golf when they retire, assuming their place in the sprinklered Valhalla. One of America’s whitest, hoariest communities, the Villages in Florida, embodies a golf-enabled culture: When they’re not driving golf carts around the greens, residents pilot pimped-up carts around the neighborhood.

Golf meant trouble when I was little. My friends and I would play guerilla warfare on courses and pretend the players were Russians. We took cover in sand traps until we got caught by the enemy and grounded by our parents.

Then in 1971, the U.S. Open came to town. We lived near the Merion Golf Club in suburban Philadelphia. My mom snagged a pair of passes, and we spent two days gawking at the TV cameras and soft-spoken announcers. We couldn’t get near the Nordic god Jack Nicklaus, but for a while we tagged behind the 1968 Open champ, perpetually smiling Lee Trevino. At the age of 16 I was becoming aware of the undercurrent of class in America. Trevino seemed the anti-golfer, a brownskin who somehow broke into the white bastion of the clubhouse.⁵ The day after we showed up, on the first hole of a tense 18-hole playoff, Trevino tossed a rubber snake in Nicklaus’s direction.⁶ How un-clubbable!

I remember three other things about that Open. Trevino won. (Yay!) An announcer used the word “manicured” to describe the greens, as if they lay at the end of a Main Line debutante’s silky fingers. And Merion looked like an iron-fenced Eden. I’ve never been back.

Courses have always seemed forbidden land to me, which is silly. I’m a privileged white man with golfer friends; back in the day I looked forward to Bob Sullivan’s delightful golf column in a magazine I edited.⁷ Who am I to get all anti-elitist?

But golf takes elitism to eleven. Golfers don’t just own clubs, they belong to them.⁸ I like to imagine that, while riding around in those wonderful carts, golfers make deals and divvy up the riches of the land. Yet the game has the Trumpist teflon quality of denying its very elitism. Golf allows upperclass Americans to feel they belong in the upper class even while denying the existence of classes—America’s happiest delusion.

Let the Brits rank each other’s poshness. Let them tolerate the mediocrities who live in castles that their thuggish ancestors wrested from weaker brutes. In America, we believe that any kid with gumption, a hard work ethic, and a yen for plaid waist-expanding pants can rise to the rank of golfer.

America is the land of aspiration, golf is our most aspirational sport, and therefore it’s the most American.

Of course, not everyone shares that green-hued Horatio-Algeresque myth. But this is what rhetorical virtue is all about:

Membership in a particular tribe depends on the other members’ belief that you share their myths. If you want golfers to accept you, don the golfwear. Use “par” metaphorically, as in, “That’s par for our competitive set.” Look holy when someone mentions St. Andrews. You’re practicing decorum, the art of using apparent virtue to make a tribe believe you fit in.

If “apparent” and “believe” make you gag, good for you. Rhetoric is a dark art; it’s up to you to parse the ethics. But when you develop an eye for virtue, endoscoping the myths and values of tribes, you can develop a sophisticated understanding of what divides us, and what brings us together.

Plus it just might make you believe that, for better and worse, golf is America’s true pastime. Do argue with me in the comments.

1. But then there’s Eurovision, which makes the Super Bowl halftime look like a chamber music concert. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

2. Steph Curry is the exception that proves the rule.

3. Tiger Woods is the exception that proves the rule.

4. Hoover, Truman, and Carter—who incidentally suffered terrible ratings while in office—were the non-golfing exceptions that prove the rule.

5. Trevino was the exception that proved the rule, or maybe just bent it.

6. It was rumored to be a psych-out attempt, but we later learned that Nicklaus had asked to see the snake. Trevino’s kid had hidden it in his golf bag as a prank. That kid was clearly unclubbable.

7. Besides, I happen to practice the obscure, extremely northern European sport of skate-skiing. There goes my shot at the presidency.

8. Groucho Marx and I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.