Korea: something is happening south of the 38th parallel. It's become a breeding ground for a hot new export: lady glofers

Golf Digest, April, 2004 by Tom Callahan

Indeed, although plenty of despots have played golf--Castro, Franco and Marcos, to name three--golf and totalitarianism don't mix. When despots fall, golf rounds explode. Witness the fact that when the Berlin Wall went down, rounds went up everywhere behind the Iron Curtain. I did a double take reading the sports pages last year when, searching for golf results, I came across a European tour event called "The Russian Open." Karl Marx must be turning in his grave.

Or maybe not. Maybe had Marx been a golfer when he was writing Das Kapital back in the British Museum library in London, he would have realized that there is something democratizing about golf. Golf is a game that is built around something that totalitarian regimes fear and seek to prevent: horizontal conversation. Totalitarian regimes are built on top-down monologues. Golf promotes just the opposite. Four hours together on the links and the right people could plan the overthrow of anyone.

But golf is also such a threat to autocrats and dictators because it is a game that is built around the rule of law--namely the Rules of Golf. In most other sports the object of the game is to cheat as much as the referees will let you. Real golfers, though, are strict constitutionalists. They believe in the rule of law as the foundation of their game and of all other good things. There is no room for a despot's whim in golf, nor for a police state--you call infractions on yourself. Can you imagine trying to be a despot in a country where every citizen played golf? Impossible. Do you think it was an accident that both the Rules of Golf and the Magna Carta came out of the British Isles? No way.

A few years ago I came up with "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" after I discovered that no two countries that had McDonald's had ever fought a war against each other. David Plotz, of Slate Magazine, did me one better. He found that countries that had at least one golf course per million people were golfing countries, and golfing countries tended not to fight wars with other golfing countries. Writing in The New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2000, Plotz advocated building more courses in North Korea, saying, "What better way to end 50 years of strife than to teach North Koreans to make par, not war?"

All of which is to say that maybe the greatest threat posed to North Korea comes not from Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney, but rather from the likes of K.J. Choi, Mi Hyun Kim and Grace Park. The more they become role models for young people in the North, the more the regime will be threatened from below, which is how such regimes begin to crumble. So far the North Korean dictatorship has survived all external pressures, and could do so for a while, so why not try something new. Let's flood them with thousands of clubs and balls, flagsticks and cups--and most of all millions of copies of the Rules of Golf translated into Korean.

Contributing Editor Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner.