Challenges Mount As UK Golf Lockdown Continues

Most mornings David Roy drives to Crail Golfing Society in the East Neuk of Fife where he steers his car into its designated parking space. Then he walks briskly towards his office in the clubhouse perched on a crag overlooking the North Sea, settles at his desk and begins another day at work. Not now though. Not since late March when the UK government instituted a lockdown, requiring citizens to remain at home except for essential reasons such as medical and food. No sport meant no golf. Not even walking on a golf course.

Roy is the secretary/manager of Crail Golfing Society, the club and its two courses just along from St Andrews, and for the past six weeks he and golf club officials throughout the United Kingdom have been in charge of what was hitherto a popular and often pretty recreational facility covering as many as a  couple of hundred acres but is now deserted as part of the government’s attempt to deal with COVID-19.

A golf course with no players on it is an eerie sight. A clubhouse with no members is strange. No laugh...