Instead of a statement, here's an honest question for liberals and conservatives alike. (Even a few liberals play golf. Like Obama.)
My golf club has a policy of allowing people on the course but only if (a) you walk -- no carts, which could be contaminated. (b) You don't come within 6 yards of another golfer. (3) You have you bring your own clubs -- there are no people in the storage areas to retrieve them. You're allowed to use the practice chipping and putting areas if (a) you bring your own balls, and don't exchange balls with anyone, (b) you don't get within 6 yards of another player. Again, no carts.
Arizona (where I don't live) is currently having a controversy about golf courses being allowed to remain open. Do you think the courses should be closed as a matter of solidarity with the rest of the country which has no such outlet? Or that they should be allowed to remain open under conditions outlined above? Is this a richie-richie v. proletarian kind of controversy, even though the biggest golf courses around here are (a) public or (b) operated by casinos at cheap prices? Is this controversy aimed at Trump, who, by actual count, has been in office 1,167 days (as of April Fool's Day) and has, by actual count, on that day, played 117 rounds of golf at an approximate cost to the taxpayers of $133,000,000?* (There are actual websites who keep track of these things, easily found on the net.)
Anyway, should golf be banned?
The temptation for me is to say no. I don't play golf but the actual mechanics of it can be made consistent with physical distancing, it seems to me. So what can go wrong.
Hiking on forest trails is probably also as safe as can be. But in southwestern Ontario, local authorities had to shut down a Conservation Area last week (or maybe the week before, it's kind of a blur) because the spot attracted so many people that the parking lot overflowed and people were parking where they shouldn't, blocking access, etc. But also, with that many people access bottlenecks were being created at trail heads, outhouses, etc. Being spring, some spots were muddy and were being trampled. Lacking the staff to police all the sensitive spots, they chose to close the place down. So a relatively safe thing, hiking, was made relatively unsafe because of overuse, or so the people in charge judged. I'm sure many people were not happy with that decision.
(FYI, Conservation Areas are a designation used for semi-wilderness protected areas that can host picnicking, hiking, cross country skiing, rock climbing, soccer fields, canoeing, swimming, etc., depending on topography. They vary greatly in size and layout, but they all tend to be much bigger than what you'd normally think of as a park, some are bigger than golf courses.)
Not knowing much about golf, it seems that bottlenecks can occur before the first hole and after the last but that seems easy enough to manage, we do it in grocery stores every day. But compliance could ruin things. If a few people show up who haven't bought into the distancing thing and one is a carrier and inadvertently infects an innocent bystander and he brings the bug home, it's easy to imagine a bad sequence of events.
This can happen in a grocery store line too, of course. Except that at any one time, a grocery store contains a wide variety of people. A queue at the first hole only has golfers in it. If a non-complier (is that a word?) shows up, will people feel more or less reticent to voice their displeasure at the behaviour, seeing as how they are all part of the same "club". I don't know.
To my mind, a question of responsibility arises. If that bad sequence of events happened, would the golf course operators feel responsible for the bad outcome. I understand that the proximate cause of that kind of transmission is not the golf course rules, it is the people who were careless about distancing, but I can see a situation where some operators might feel as if they're partly to blame. Other operators might not. What might lead them to think one way or the other is probably affected by what's going on around them. If the golf course is in the middle of nowhere in Arizona or Utah, and only 13 Covid-19 cases exist in the immediate area, that's one thing. But if we get to the point that 2000 people are dying every day and the hospitals are backed up, then the operators of a golf course in a Connecticut suburb might see things differently. In that latter case, anything that could remotely be seen as a risk would be frowned upon by a lot of people.
The governor of Florida only yesterday decided to implement distancing directives to the entire state. So presumably, a few golfers in northern Florida on Tuesday might have been emboldened to flaunt distancing guidelines. One of them could easily have passed on the bug, this at a time when a lot of the rest of the world knew better. Who would be responsible in such a case, the unknown (even to himself) contagious guy, the golf course operators, the governor?
I don't know if I can make a general call on the question in the absence of context. What's acceptable social behaviour on Monday might change by Friday. Everyone has and wants rights, but humans tend to be a bit more confused about responsibilities, especially if it costs them something.
(As an aside and unrelated to your question, one of the episodes from Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast concerned the private golf courses in Los Angeles and how they enjoyed all kinds of benefits that were grandfathered in from a different era. It was an interesting discussion. (From season 2 episode 1:
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoiled, available widely.)
