Gary Player: The 88-Year-Old Jet-Setting Black Knight Still Outdriving Geopolitics
Gary Player, the Black Knight of the fairways, has spent nine decades swinging clubs and scolding the rest of us for not doing enough sit-ups. Born in 1935 on a South African cattle farm so remote it probably didn’t get the memo about apartheid until the late nineties, Player has become the planet’s most peripatetic pensioner—logging 15 million air miles, collecting nine major titles, and still finding time to remind every head of state, CEO, and weekend hacker that the back nine of life is no excuse for a soft midsection.
Internationally, Player is less a golfer than a geopolitical weather vane. When he first flew out of Jan Smuts Airport in 1955, the world map was a polite fiction drawn in London, Paris, and Lisbon. By the time he’d conquered Augusta, St Andrews, and Royal Melbourne, decolonisation had rearranged the borders faster than a clubhouse gin-and-tonic. Player never claimed credit for dismantling empires, yet there he was, a suntanned datum point in a blazer, proving that a 5-foot-6 Afrikaner could conquer colonial courses without a single gunboat. The symbolism was almost too neat: if the British Empire could be beaten by a man who weighed less than a bag of his own irons, what chance did it have against Nasser, Nkrumah, or Nehru?
Today, the Black Knight’s relevance lies less in birdies than in brand extensions. There are Gary Player Design courses in Vietnam, China, and the Dominican Republic—countries that, during his prime, were either at war, closed to capitalism, or too busy inventing merengue to worry about bunkers. Each course arrives with the usual brochure poetry (“harmony with nature,” “legacy of excellence,” etc.), but the subtext is unmistakable: if you want to launder geopolitical anxiety into 18 holes of serenity, Gary’s your guy. He’ll even throw in a free fitness tip while you’re overpaying for clubhouse sliders.
The environmental ironies are, of course, delicious. Player built his legend on courses carved from veldt and scrub, yet now speaks at COP summits about carbon footprints. He flies private to lecture on sustainability, a contradiction he acknowledges with the serene fatalism of a man who’s already out-driven his own hypocrisy. “I’ve planted six million trees,” he likes to say, neglecting to mention that several now shade the patios of Gulf-state palaces whose owners needed somewhere to park their second Boeing. Still, in an era when most octogenarians struggle to operate the TV remote, Player can still do 1,000 sit-ups before breakfast—an achievement that feels both heroic and vaguely accusatory.
What does it all mean for the rest of us? Simply this: Gary Player is the last living argument that borders, empires, and ideologies are just sand traps to be negotiated with enough torque and a clean follow-through. While the planet debates tariffs, carbon credits, and whose navy gets to police which strait, Player keeps boarding planes, repeating his mantra: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” It’s a philosophy that once sounded like bootstrap boosterism; today it scans as gallows humor for a world that’s running out of both luck and practice swings.
So here we are, circling the globe in our algorithmic holding patterns, binge-winking at doomscrolling memes, and somehow the 88-year-old who still does one-handed push-ups is the sanest geopolitical actor in the room. That, dear reader, is either inspirational or definitive proof that the apocalypse will arrive wearing plus-fours and carrying a 7-iron. Either way, tee it high and let it fly—because if Gary Player has taught us anything, it’s that the final scorecard isn’t measured in majors but in miles flown, trees planted, and the number of dictators you’ve convinced to adopt Bermuda greens. The world is his course; we’re just trying to stay out of the rough.
