"If there is any larceny in a man, golf will bring it out"
About this Quote
Golf sells itself as etiquette made athletic: hushed greens, polished clubs, self-scored honesty. Gallico’s jab works because it punctures that whole genteel costume with one crude word: larceny. Not cheating, not gamesmanship - theft. The implication is that golf doesn’t merely tempt small rule-bending; it reveals a deeper appetite to take what isn’t yours, then call it “keeping pace” or “taking relief.”
The line lands in the long tradition of writers treating golf as a moral laboratory disguised as leisure. Unlike sports with referees hovering over every play, golf outsources enforcement to the player. You declare penalties on yourself. You assess your own lie. You report your own score. That setup turns the course into a pressure cooker for rationalization: the stakes are rarely life-changing, yet the ego stakes feel enormous. A foot wedge becomes “practical.” A generous gimme becomes “friendly.” The theft is often tiny, but the self-justification is grand.
Gallico, a midcentury journalist-novelist with a nose for social performance, is also aiming at class theater. Golf is where businessmen rehearse integrity in public, where “character” is supposedly legible in how you mark a ball. His cynicism suggests the opposite: put men in a status-charged setting with ambiguous evidence and no cop, and you don’t get virtue - you get creative accounting.
It’s a joke with teeth because it’s less about golf than about the flattering myth that civility equals morality.
The line lands in the long tradition of writers treating golf as a moral laboratory disguised as leisure. Unlike sports with referees hovering over every play, golf outsources enforcement to the player. You declare penalties on yourself. You assess your own lie. You report your own score. That setup turns the course into a pressure cooker for rationalization: the stakes are rarely life-changing, yet the ego stakes feel enormous. A foot wedge becomes “practical.” A generous gimme becomes “friendly.” The theft is often tiny, but the self-justification is grand.
Gallico, a midcentury journalist-novelist with a nose for social performance, is also aiming at class theater. Golf is where businessmen rehearse integrity in public, where “character” is supposedly legible in how you mark a ball. His cynicism suggests the opposite: put men in a status-charged setting with ambiguous evidence and no cop, and you don’t get virtue - you get creative accounting.
It’s a joke with teeth because it’s less about golf than about the flattering myth that civility equals morality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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