Why I’m defending Gary Player

The comments on a recent post about Burma became a rather interesting exchange, and I promised a more detailed reply. I wrote a response to a call by George Monbiot and Desmond Tutu for a boycott of Gary Player. The commenter who raised it, Leo Africanus, took it rather personally, though I seem to recall saying his view was “interesting” and “has merit”. I also called it “a disgrace” when Nelson Mandela did decide to dump Player as host of the Nelson Mandela Invitational golf tournament.

The main point here is that Gary Player’s reputation as a defender of Apartheid isn’t relevant. He may well be a racist sod and political opportunist. As I pointed out, I’m not about to take his word for it that he isn’t. I didn’t counter Leo Africanus’s arguments in this regard because I had no intention of defending Player’s history or character.

The sole reason given for the boycott call was that he had designed a golf course in Burma in 2002, and that its use by the junta there constituted sufficient reason for Nelson Mandela to distance himself from Player. That is the point on which I disagree.

If the problem really was his reputation as a racist throwback to Apartheid, he would have (and should have) been censured years ago. Even then, it seems arbitrary to single him out when a lot of other people qualify for the same treatment, and it would be rather contrary to the spirit of reconciliation, instead of revenge, for which Nelson Mandela himself became the icon.

Ostracising Player now, on the flimsy pretext that one of the many golf courses he designed was built in Burma — at a time when the political situation there was more promising than at any other time in recent history — smacks of hypocrisy.

And when Player’s own country, South Africa, couldn’t even be bothered to join a UN vote calling on the Burmese junta to cease its repression, let alone to support sanctions against the regime, idioms about splinters and motes, pots and kettles, come to mind.