Sign up for our daily newsletter

Latest news, reviews, analysis and opinion, plus unmissable deals for bunkered subscriptions, events, and our commercial partners.

Ostensibly, golf and cinema have endured a peculiar relationship.

Whilst the sport has been central to the plotline of several movies – from Caddyshack, to Happy Gilmore, Tin Cup, to Tommy’s Honor and Blades (Google it) – it has never delivered a bona fide box office smash. Tin Cup, indeed, is the highest grossing golf film of all time, but the $54 million it made at the worldwide box office doesn’t even come close to cracking the top 1,000 all-time movie money-makers.

Instead, the sport’s biggest silver screen successes have come in fleeting appearances in non-golf flicks. From Paul Giamatti’s Miles losing his temper with the group behind in Sideways to Bill Murray’s Bob Harris smoking a drive towards Mount Fuji in Lost In Translation, golf has made a string of memorable cameos.

None, however, can rival its part in Goldfinger. The third ‘official’ instalment in the James Bond franchise, it sees 007 – played by the late Sir Sean Connery – challenge eponymous villain Auric Goldfinger –Gert Fröbe – to 18 holes.

The scene lasts little less than ten minutes and has taken its place in movie lore, as much for the incongruity of the debonair, ruthless, womanising Bond having either the time or patience for golf as anything else.

But to anybody who knew the character’s creator Ian Fleming, there was an inevitability his leading man would have a passion for the sport.

The man with the golden pen

Born in the affluent London district of Mayfair in May 1908, Ian Lancaster Fleming was the second of four sons born to Scottish MP Valentine Fleming and his wife Evelyn. His paternal grandfather was Scottish financier Robert Fleming, who co-founded the Scottish American Investment Company and the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co.

Days before his ninth birthday, Fleming’s father was killed by German shelling on the Western Front. An obituary for him that ran in The Times, incidentally, was written by Winston Churchill.

At that time, Fleming attended Durnford School in Dorset. He subsequently enrolled at Eton College followed by an ill-fated year at the Royal Military College in Sandhurst and a spell at the Tennerhof in Austria, a small private school run by the former British spy Ernan Forbes Dennis and his novelist wife Phyllis Bottome. Brief stints at Munich University and the University of Geneva were intended to set Fleming up for a job in the British Foreign Office but, when that fell through, he joined the Reuters News Agency as a journalist and sub-editor.

That took him to Moscow, where he reported on the Stalin regime, before he quit in October 1933 to focus on a career in finance.

When World War II broke out, he was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, to become his personal assistant. He joined the organisation full-time in August 1939 and was given the codename ‘17F’. Throughout the war, Fleming was involved in the planning of various espionage missions and intelligence gathering exercises, such as Operation Ruthless, a plan designed to obtain details of the Enigma codes used by the German Navy, and Operation Goldeneye, intended to maintain an intelligence framework in Spain in the event of a German takeover.

When the conflict ended in 1945, Fleming returned to civilian life as the foreign manager of the Kemsley newspaper group, which, at that time, owned the Sunday Times. However, his ambitions extended much further. During the war, he had mentioned to friends that he intended to write a spy novel, and, in January 1952, he set to work on it in earnest. Averaging 2,000 words a day, he completed it within a month. The book was Casino Royale. A little over a year later, in April 1953, it was released in the UK by publishing house Jonathan Cape. Centering on the exploits and adventures of fictional MI6 officer James Bond, the book was a massive commercial success. Three print runs were required to satisfy demand.

The follow-up to Casino Royale, Live And Let Die, was published in April 1954, followed by Moonraker a year later and Diamonds Are Forever in March 1956. By the decade’s end, there were seven Bond books in circulation, with an eighth on the way.

That piqued the interest of Albert R. ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, a British movie producer. Originally discouraged from pursuing the film rights to the book by his former business partner, Broccoli acquired them in 1961 and, a year later, the first EON-produced Bond movie, Dr No, hit cinemas. It made an instant star of its lead – the hitherto little-known Scottish former milkman Sean Connery – and catapulted its fictional hero into the consciousness of the public-at-large. Amidst the ensuing Bond-mania of the sixties, most observers assumed ‘007’ was a fictionalised version of Fleming himself. They were wrong. Bond, it seems, was inspired by a golfer – and a well-known one at that.

Henry Cotton
Three-time Open champion Henry Cotton is reckoned to have been Ian Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond.

Building Bond

Introduced to golf during his time at Durnford, Fleming’s interest piqued shortly after his father’s death, when he would customarily spend his weekends playing with his grandmother, Katie, at Huntercombe Golf Club in Oxfordshire. Katie, incidentally, was an eccentric who tipped her caddies with toothbrushes instead of money.

In 1948, Fleming joined Royal St George’s. The Kent club fit his bachelor lifestyle perfectly. After finishing work on a Friday night, he would jump into his black Ford Thunderbird – a set of clubs lying across the backseat – and drive to his weekend home in Sandwich.

It was at Royal St George’s that he first met Henry Cotton. Already a two-time Open champion, Cotton won for a third time at Muirfield in 1948. Once described as “conspicuously ambitious and intelligent”, he partied as hard as he worked. He drank Champagne, ate caviar, wore tailored clothes, drove a Rolls Royce, was married to an Argentinean heiress – Isabel-Maria Estanguet de Moss, the daughter of a Buenos Aires beef merchant – and lived in a five-star hotel suite. “The best,” he said often, “is always good enough for me.”

Not that Bond could be a complete carbon copy of Cotton. If he was that good at golf, after all, he would be wasted working for the Secret Intelligence Service. So, Fleming took the parts of Cotton that impressed him most and combined them with some of his own attributes. Like Fleming, for example, Bond played off nine and had a short, flat swing. The bus service Fleming sometimes used to commute from London to Canterbury for rounds at St George’s? That was numbered ‘007’. And then there was his well-documented penchant for gambling. The decision to pit Bond against Goldfinger in a high-stakes money match likely came from Fleming’s own fondness for a flutter. “He was a great one to gamble on his games,” Albert Whiting, the then head pro at St George’s, is on record as saying. “He hated to lose. Everybody had to play like hell.”

So, when it came to writing Goldfinger in the late 1950s, it was no surprise that Fleming incorporated golf into the story. Indeed, the only surprise was that it had taken him seven Bond outings to do so.

Sean Connery enjoys a laugh with Gert Frobe and Harold T Sakata during the filming of the golf scene for Goldfinger.

‘Strict Rules’

Whilst Royal St George’s was the inspiration for Bond’s 18-hole match with Goldfinger, Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire – the golf club closest to the 007 set at Pinewood Studios – was used for filming it. Now owned by the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, the resort opened in 1908 and has featured in a string of movies. By curious coincidence, Daniel Craig ‘died’ on the steps of the clubhouse in 2004 British crime thriller Layer Cake, a performance that was reportedly decisive in him being cast as the new James Bond less than a year later.

There are countless little nods to Royal St George’s sprinkled throughout the scene. For example, the club pro in the movie is listed as ‘Albert Blacking’, instead of ‘Albert Whiting’, the St George’s pro; Bond’s caddie is named ‘Hawker’ in tribute to St George’s most in-demand looper at that time, Alf Hawkes; and the scene that unfolds could have been plucked straight from a conversation at one of the many gentlemen’s lunches Fleming attended.

It sees Bond and Goldfinger play a match for a shilling a hole, the stakes raised late in the round by 007 to a bar of Nazi gold valued at £5,000. All-square on the 17th tee, Bond finds the fairway, whilst Goldfinger pulls his drive into thick rough. When he is unable to locate his ball, the arch-villain’s sidekick ‘Oddjob’ rolls a replacement down his trouser leg and beckons his boss over.

“Slazenger number one? Güt!” says Goldfinger.

But Hawker’s having none of it. “If that’s his original ball,” the looper tells Bond, “then I’m Arnold Palmer.”

“It isn’t,” replies Bond.

“How do you know?”

“I’m standing on it.” He raises his foot to reveal Goldfinger’s original ball underneath. Bond allows his opponent to complete the hole and, as he retrieves Goldfinger’s ball from the cup, switches it for a different ball, a Slazenger ‘7’.

After Bond misses an eight-footer on the 18th, Goldfinger believes he has won the match. Again, Bond goes to retrieve his ball from the hole, at which point he lands the sucker-punch.

“You play a Slazenger ‘1’, don’t you?” he asks.

“Yes, why?” replies Goldfinger.

“This is a Slazenger ‘7’. Here’s my Penfold Heart. You must have played the wrong ball somewhere on the 18th fairway. We are playing strict rules, so I’m afraid you lose the hole and the match.”

A furious Goldfinger glowers at Oddjob, throws his ball to the ground in disgust, and storms off. To those who knew him best, there was a certain inevitability about Fleming inserting a rules dispute into the story. He was a known stickler for etiquette and golf’s code of ethics.

As for Bond choosing a Penfold ball? Another nod to Henry Cotton, who won the 1948 Open using a Penfold RF-126.

Sean Connery
Sean Connery became hooked on golf after filming Goldfinger.

Lightsh, camera, action

Performing that particular scene in Goldfinger started a decades-long love affair with golf for Sean Connery.

Despite growing up in Edinburgh, just down the road from Bruntsfield Links, one of the world’s oldest golf courses, and later working as a coffin polisher in Haddington on ‘Scotland’s Golf Coast’ itself, the sport had, to that point, largely passed him by. All that changed when he was cast opposite accomplished golfer Fröbe.

“I began to take lessons on a course near the Pinewood film studios, and was immediately hooked,” he wrote in his memoir, Being A Scot. “I began to see golf as a metaphor for living, for in golf you are basically on your own, competing against yourself and always trying to do better.

“If you cheat, you will be the loser, because you are cheating yourself.

“When Ian Fleming portrayed Auric Goldfinger as a smooth cheater, James Bond had no regrets when he switched his golf balls, since to be cheated is the just reward of the cheater.”

To fully get to grips with the intricacies and nuances of the sport, Connery became a regular at Royal Dornoch during the filming of Goldfinger. He subsequently became a regular in celebrity pro-ams and reportedly played off as low as seven.

“Over the years golf has taught me much, and its implicit codes of conduct have provided me with the nearest I have ever come to religion,” he added in his memoir. “A golf player is on his honour to call a shot against himself and to be considerate to other players following up behind. I can illustrate this well from an incident I heard about when playing a round at Pine Valley, considered to be the finest golf course in America.

“Cliff Robertson, a veteran golfer in his 80s who carried the history of Pine Valley on his shoulders, came up behind a foursome. Etiquette would have normally let him play through. He asked the caddie to ask permission for this from the foursome, but he returned to say that their answer was no. So he got on to his cart and went up to them.

“‘Before you say anything,’ he told them, ‘you have no standing. There is no one in front of you.’ Then he turned to the caddie: ‘Take all their bags back on the cart to the clubhouse.’ ‘Don’t touch our clubs!’ one protested. ‘Who invited you?’ ‘Some member.’ ‘You will never set foot on Pine Valley in your lives again. And your friend is now barred from Pine Valley for a year. Now I would like to play through.’ What a marvellous lesson that was.”

Fleming, one suspects, would have approved. Alas, he passed away in August 1964 after taking ill during a lunch at his beloved Royal St George’s. He was, at the time, the club’s captain-elect.

Connery, meantime, died on October 31, 2020, at his home in the Bahamas, whilst Fröbe had passed away in Munich in September 1988.

The three men at the heart of an entire sport’s cinematic magnum opus, all sadly gone. Such is the vulnerability of man and inevitable mortality. But Bond – like golf – lives on.

Roll the credits.

• This feature first appeared in issue 218 of bunkered. For more like this, take out a subscription. International subscriptions also available.


author headshot

Michael McEwan is the Deputy Editor of bunkered and has been part of the team since 2004. In that time, he has interviewed almost every major figure within the sport, from Jack Nicklaus, to Rory McIlroy, to Donald Trump. The host of the multi award-winning bunkered Podcast and a member of Balfron Golfing Society, Michael is the author of three books and is the 2023 PPA Scotland 'Writer of the Year' and 'Columnist of the Year'. Dislikes white belts, yellow balls and iron headcovers. Likes being drawn out of the media ballot to play Augusta National.

Deputy Editor

More Reads

Image Turnberry green

The bunkered Golf Course Guide - Scotland

Now, with bunkered, you can discover the golf courses Scotland has to offer. Trust us, you will not be disappointed.

Find Courses