It is no surprise that Ernie Els and Retief Goosen attended the White House meeting
First published in Business Day and BusinessLive
23 May 2025
Golf is no frivolous sideshow in international politics. The delegations that met in the Oval Office on Wednesday included two of the greatest professionals of the modern era, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, and two of its less talented amateurs, presidents Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa. When Ramaphosa finally emerged from the White Madhouse, he claimed the golf-themed meeting had gone “very well”.
Leftists have long claimed that the world’s most advanced banana republic concentrates power in a small, interlocking elite that dominates political, economic, and military institutions. Representatives of the elite share common backgrounds, world views and interests, their integration reinforced by education in elite universities, overlapping seats on company boards, and memberships of specific social institutions — including golf clubs.
In SA, likewise, exclusive clubs such as Randpark, Houghton or Fancourt are important networking spaces, in which businesspeople, officials, and politicians can mingle informally. Many members of the new political elite have adopted the sport, while ANC golf days have become routine fundraising events.
Gated golf estates have produced walled enclaves of privilege, but they have also nurtured elite networks in which powerful people interact informally, build trust and reinforce group identity.
Even golf’s scourges of racial and gender exclusion have been partially tackled. One Transnet executive apologised for her late arrival at a function because of an overrun of an employer-financed golf lesson that was intended to mitigate her exclusion, as a black woman, from routine parastatal meetings on the golf course.
Golf also promotes global elite cohesion, through pro-am events, corporate-sponsored international tours, day-trips linked to global banks or investment summits, and jet-and-golf resort circuits in Dubai, the Caribbean, or Mauritius.
US presidents, Middle Eastern royals, Asian billionaires and African political leaders can interact outside formal institutions, engage in “soft lobbying” and trust-building, and exchange sensitive, or even classified, information. Memberships in elite clubs, such as Augusta, The Els Club in Dubai, or Trump’s own Turnberry in Scotland, serve as global status markers, and provide arenas of sociability and informal governance in which relationships can be cultivated. Golf may truly be an obsession for many of the rich and powerful, but it is a highly convenient obsession.
This columnist once asked Ramaphosa if he had ever cheated at golf; he seemed genuinely horrified by the idea. Trump, in contrast, an enthusiastic golfer of modest ability, often reports purported victories — especially in his own charity tournaments — that are not corroborated by those who played against him.
On Wednesday, many viewers of the Oval Office spectacle would have been reminded by the presence of these greater and lesser golfers of a famous scene in the movie Goldfinger. Secret agent James Bond, played by Sean Connery, outwits the villainous Auric Goldfinger on a luxurious links at the gold-and-gilt obsessed criminal’s “Royal St Marks” golf club.
Goldfinger is an expert golfer, calm and calculating. But he is also a cheat, whose caddie secretly switches a ball that he had hit out of bounds, allowing the villain to avoid penalty strokes. But Bond tricks Goldfinger into playing the wrong ball on the final hole, which under the rules of golf means disqualification.
The movie is a reminder that the game of golf is bound by moral rules, but that elites will twist or break them. The resemblance between the Bond and Goldfinger face-off and the Oval Office drama was sharpened by the presence at the latter of US vice-president JD “Oddjob” Vance, Trump’s — or rather Goldfinger’s — squat Korean chauffeur, bodyguard and golf caddie.
• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.
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