Without Shoes is a musing, not so much about shoes, as it is about snobbery and entitlement in the constricted world of country clubs.

Ramblings on Golf, Shoes, and Entitlement

I often think about a favorite painting, Vincent van Gogh’s still life, A Pair of Shoes. The painting is a metaphor for a life of toil and a wordless description of their owner.   The frayed leather and worn-out soles are the badge of a humble worker and speak of a weary man, or woman it’s hard to see which from the painting, trudging with heavy loads through muddy fields and cobbled streets. There seemed to be nothing sadder than old shoes, the leather chaffed and scuffed like the people who owned them. No one goes through life without being scuffed and scraped. People polish their surfaces but the small scars of wear and disappointment remain.

Sneakers and Cargo Shorts

The valet didn’t jump at the chance to park my rented compact and carry my bag to the tee. I found a spot for it in the shade of a well-polished Bentley and an overfed Lincoln SUV.   When I got to the clubhouse carrying my bag, the caddie master gave me a look that said that I missed the turn-off for the public links, and when I said I wouldn’t be using an electric golfcart, he remarked to his assistants that I was a walker, one of those eccentric golfers that insist on walking around a golf course.  

 I was on the practice tee warming up before my round, hitting shots while I was waiting for my nephew, a professional golfer and the CEO of one of the top 25 golf courses in the United States.  A woman with a little too much makeup, and a gold chain that was too thick to wear during a golf round stopped her cart abruptly alongside me and got out. It happened occasionally that senior players stood and watched because they thought I hit the ball well and swung smoothly, and that this was the case.   I leaned my club against my bag, said “Hi” and extended her my hand in greeting, but was left holding it in front of me while she looked at it like I had just used it to wipe pigeon droppings from my forehead.  She said without ceremony, “you are breaking our dress code.”  “Sorry,” I said in the interrogative, more as a request for her to repeat what she had said than an apology. “You are a visitor at our club and you are breaking our dress code.  “And who are you,” I asked, aware of a slight stiffening of the hairs on the back of my neck. Flaring her nostrils, she answered with the prim derisiveness of an unsympathetic teacher reprimanding a remiss student.  With enough chill to freeze the beads of sweat on my arms she hissed, “I am the club superintendent.”  “Our rules of etiquette and appropriate dress are posted on our web page and in the clubhouse.”  I mentally inventoried my clothing from head to toe. Golf cap - okay not backwards, beak not turned up. Shirt Lacoste, collared and tucked in but probably a few washes too many, shorts-Tommy Hilfiger- belted - ok – but too baggy, not Bermuda length? Aha! My Nike trainers.  I thought that they were discreet but the day glow orange uppers were obviously the foot ware of the riff- raff.  She continued, “the rules distinctly stipulate that athletic shoes aren’t allowed on the course and that one’s socks must come up to mid-calf,” and then she added, “cargo shorts aren’t permitted either.”  “Oh, sorry again, I always wondered what cargo shorts were,” and made an entry in my mental note pad: “Unpleasant meeting with the course gestapo.”  I didn’t bother to explain to her that at my home club, a place of easy-going sociability, all that was required was that you dressed neatly, and that no one would remark on it if you didn’t. When she suggested that I buy a pair of golf shoes  in the pro-shop, I didn’t bother to tell her that I was travelling light and didn’t want to weigh down my baggage, and that I already owned three pairs. Nor would she have been impressed if I told her that the legendary players Hogan and Snead recommended practicing barefoot to improve balance, and if that was the case why couldn’t I play in sneakers.  Later when I read the club rules of attire and deportment, I thought that they read like articles of war. Members of this club paid hefty membership fees to keep interlopers- me? - outside the gates, not to mention life, and hired people whose job it was to protect their delicate sensibilities.  These people were well schooled in absurd dress codes that seemed more important to them than the game and no amount of well struck balls, or a good swing could make up for the fact that I had a carry bag and wore a pair of sneakers.

Of course, I knew that her arrogance was indicative of the small battles that are fought continually in the ongoing class war between the haves and have-nots and had nothing to do with playing etiquette, normal courtesy, civilized behavior, or clothing. I understood that this wasn’t a dress code as much as a list of restrictions for this rigid fortress where the main objective was to shut out anything remotely different. I had grown up caddying at a similar bastion of the cash-flow rich, so besides learning the game, I became well acquainted with snobbery and condescension. 

“Ai scalzi” literally translated from Italian means without shoes and is the name of a trattoria near Canal Grande in Venice.  I sat at a table on its veranda and jotted down this story inspired by its name, and thoughts of a day when I didn’t have proper shoes. While I was fantasizing about keying all the Bentleys in that parking lot, a waiter seeing my note pad smiled and asked what I was writing. I explained that I was writing about shoes.  Noticing that I had taken mine off and placed them alongside my chair, he asked if my feet were tired after my morning of sightseeing.  “Shoes are like a window to the heart” he said mysteriously” as though I was sitting at an ashram meditating and not a restaurant sipping a cappuccino.  “And AI Scalzi is the right place to think about shoes, or take them off if need be.”   “May I bring you another cappuccino” he offered, and added with Italian grace, “now that it is almost afternoon, perhaps you would prefer a glass of Prosecco instead?”   I chose the latter, not only because it is deliciously refreshing, but at Ai Scalzi, I was a welcome guest sitting barefoot in the sun.   

And more musings about shoes

The Italians knew about shoes and food. When there was salsa left on the plate you broke a piece of bread and wiped it clean. They called that “fare la scarpetta,” make the little shoe.  A friend told me that the expression originated in a time when people were so hungry that they could eat the souls of their shoes. “Fare la scarpetta” was a ritual and an essential part of cucina povera: enjoy the meal, don’t waste anything, but it was frowned upon by the more refined, a little like me playing golf in my running shoes.

Regarding class differences the Swedes put it succinctly in their understated self- deprecating idiom – “There is a difference between a cow-patty and a pancake” meaning that the world is divided between those that have and those that don’t. There is an undefined friction between them, a battle going on between the people who do the work and the people who pay to have it done.

Once, when the renowned doctor Albert Schweitzer was being interviewed at his station in French Equatorial Africa, he surprised the journalist by rubbing his boots against the under belly of a great black pig that had wandered over, explaining affably that this is the best way to get them clean, and the sow loves it.  She is an ambling shoe brush.

I think, as much as anyone, I understood shoes. I found it enjoyable as a kid to line up the family’s shoes on Saturday evening and polish them for church the next morning. It was a time when shoes were made from leather.  First you applied a liquid stain, a dye to cover the scuff marks, and then rubbed in a wax and buff them to a shine. I had one pair, like most kids I knew and sometimes they were hand me downs made usable by Mr. Finesod, the old shoe maker who was a refugee from St. Petersburg in White Russia. He re-heeled and re-soled them, and sometimes put steel taps on them to prevent the heels and the toes from wearing.

You could learn lots of things about life on a golf course. I mentored a golf program for refugee kids, boys and girls that had newly arrived to Sweden from countries in Africa and Asia and the middle East. It was an idea I had that besides learning the fundamentals of golf that I would teach them the unwritten codes of behavior with the thought that if they could make it on the course with its unruly undergrowth of cultural codes they could make it out in a society where the obstacles were far more treacherous than on a golf course.   Doing angels on the newly mowed 18th green during a club luncheon, while a group of players were waiting to hit into it—that was a sight.