Hugo Chavez takes a swing at Golf... A security threat or just a good walk spoiled...

Scots must be shaking their heads. Fresh from nationalizing almost every capitalist enterprise that yields a profit (or used to anyway), Latin American strongman and de facto socialist dictator Hugo Chavez has found a new class enemy: golf. Declaring it a "bourgeois" sport, the Venezuelan leader has ordered the shut-down of some of the country's best-known golf courses.

Obviously golf isn't his sport because Hugo Chavez, like all dictators leads the life he wants to lead and demands that the country follow his lead. The man is clearly demented.

For a socialist like Mr. Chavez, banning golf might be considered, ahem, par for the course, even if he is, of course, a bit late to the game. The likes of China, Russia, and Cuba banned golf decades ago—although today they all enjoy practicing their swing. Perhaps this is exactly the historic precedent Mr. Chavez fears. The Soviet Union built its first golf course in 1988—and a year later, the Berlin Wall fell.

Or maybe Chavez—known for his paranoia about alleged Western plots to overthrow him—has read up on Scottish history. In 1457, King James II of Scotland banned the game from the hills on which it was created. He argued that golf was a danger to national security as it distracted his soldiers from practicing their archery.

Turns out, the king's fears may not have been entirely unfounded. Believing the threat of war had dissipated, his grandson, James IV, a keen golfer, lifted the ban in 1502. Eleven years later, in the Battle of Flodden against the English, Scotland suffered its worst ever military defeat. James himself was killed on the battlefield, along with a large contingent of Scottish nobles (many no doubt golf enthusiasts as well). Superior English archery played its part in the battle's outcome.

There could also be another reason a socialist like Mr. Chavez might dislike golf—the game is rich with religious overtones. Golf prompts many players to think about God—and not just because his name is so often (blasphemously) invoked on the course.

Players surrounded by the natural beauty the Lord created are reminded of the limits of man's ability to conquer it. Consider the elusive hole-in-one, the wind that ruins the otherwise near-perfect swing and the bunkers that upset a quick recovery. "The Calvinists' ideal testing ground," is how the late British-American journalist Alistair Cooke once described it. "The bunkers, the scrubby gorse, the heather and broom, the hillocks and innumerable undulations of the land itself, were all seen not as nuisances but as natural obstacles, as reminders to all original sinners that in competition with the Almighty, they surely would not overcome."

In that sense, golf threatens to undermine a dictator's personality-cult by reminding people of the true ultimate power. That's not the kind of message el presidente would probably like Venezuelans to hear—even if he once described Jesus as the world's first socialist.

Banning sports, though, can quickly spoil a strongman's game. Even the old Romans knew that panem et circenses were crucial to keeping Caesar in power. When English missionaries introduced Test Cricket (which takes place over several days) to Samoa, the natives loved it so much they stopped working in the Hamburg-owned sugar-cane fields. When the German consul-general banned the sport to restore productivity, it provoked a civil war.

Repressive regimes are thus usually smart enough to embrace most sports. They often even waste scarce resources on star athletes, citing their victories as evidence of their regime's superiority. Perhaps then, Mr. Chavez's attack on golf is a sign of serious deficits in Venezuela's golf talent. This explanation would fit with Mr. Chavez's attacks on the quality of the game itself.

"There are sports and there are sports," he stated on Venezuelan television. "Do you mean to tell me this is a people's sport?"

Just wait for him to echo Mark Twain's aphorism that golf is "a good walk spoiled."