Former 007 summed up all that is great about golf

When Sean Connery received the script for his third Bond film, Goldfinger, the suave spy agent was teed up a curveball by writer Ian Fleming.

Fleming, who was a member of Royal St George’s, couldn’t resist the chance to write his passion for golf into film folklore, pitting Bond, James Bond, against Goldfinger in a match filmed at Stoke Park.

The curveball was that Connery wouldn’t get away with throwing any old swing at the scene. Bond’s effortless cool had to translate to the screen at all times, golf club in hand or not. The problem was that despite growing up in the Home of Golf, Connery was no golfer. At least not yet.

The Scotsman took a Daniel Day Lewis approach to the scene, and there was method to the madness as the golf bug bit hard. So much so, Pussy Galore actress Honor Blackman once recalled, “The great joke about him was his absolute obsession about golf. He was mad about it. The rest of us had to steer him away from the subject or he’d go on for hours, giving us a ball-by-ball replay!”

Connery sounds like just about every golfer who falls for the fairways. He took to the game like his Bond character to flirting, cracking single digits as his love affair blossomed.

“It wasn’t until I was taught enough golf to look as though I could outwit the accomplished golfer Gert Frone in Goldfinger that I got the bug,” Connery said.

“I began to take lessons on a course near Pinewood Film Studios and was immediately hooked on the game. Soon it would nearly take over my life.”

Connery would see the sport as a metaphor for living, succinctly summing up our beautiful game in a way that would be the envy of golf scribes the world over.

“When you play golf, you can’t think or do anything else when you’re playing,” he said. “I think it’s the most revealing game, except I don’t know if it is a game. It’s something other than a game that I couldn’t define.

“It’s obsessive and revealing – a very healthy balancing factor, or it certainly is for me. It’s one of the few games in the world that’s still got dignity. It certainly has class.

“But it’s endless, and as Jack Nicklaus says, it’s an unfair game. You have to accept that. It’s like life in that way.

“And you can cheat at it. It’s the easiest game in the world to cheat at but as we learn in golf, the only one who suffers is you because you’ll know, and you can’t unknow.”

Connery was in Italy when he heard of Fleming’s death in 1964. He was playing golf with fellow actor Rex Harrison at the time. The pair decided to play an extra 36-holes that day in Fleming’s honour.

Connery died in 2020 at the age of 90. One of many leading tributes was current Bond star, Daniel Craig who wrote, “wherever he is, I hope there is a golf course.”

Whether you’re a devout believer or not, there’s not a golfer in the world who wouldn’t say amen to that.