Casey Martin’s Golf Cart

Casey Martin was a professional golfer with a bad leg. Due to a circulatory disorder, walking the course caused Martin considerable pain and posed a serious risk of hemorrhaging and fracture. Despite his disability, Martin had always excelled at the sport. He played on Stanford’s championship team while in college, then turned pro.

Martin asked the PGA (Professional Golfers’Association) for permission to use a golf cart during tournaments. The PGA turned him down, citing its rule prohibiting carts in top professional tournaments.

Martin took his case to court. He argued that the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) required reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities, provided the change did not “fundamentally

alter the nature” of the activity. 33 Some of the biggest names in golf testified in the case. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Ken Venturi all defended the ban on carts. They argued that fatigue is an important factor in tournament golf, and that riding rather than walking would give Martin an unfair advantage.

The case went to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices found themselves wrestling with what seemed to one a silly question, at once beneath their dignity and beyond their expertise: “Is

someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer?” 34 In fact, however, the case raised a question of justice in classic Aristotelian form: In order to decide whether Martin had a right to a golf cart, the Court had to determine the essential nature of the activity in question. Was walking the course essential to golf, or merely incidental? If, as the PGA claimed, walking was an essential aspect of the sport, then to let Martin ride in a cart would “fundamentally alter the nature” of the game. To resolve the question about rights, the court had to determine the telos, or essential nature, of the game.

The Court ruled 7–2 that Martin had a right to use a golf cart. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, analyzed the history of golf and concluded that the use of carts was not inconsistent with the fundamental character of the game. “From early on, the essence of the game has been shot-making —using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as

few strokes as possible.” 35 As for the claim that walking tests the physical stamina of golfers, Stevens cited testimony by a physiology professor who calculated that only about five hundred calories were

expended in walking eighteen holes, “nutritionally less than a Big Mac.” 36 Because golf is “a low intensity activity, fatigue from the game is primarily a psychological phenomenon in which stress and

motivation are the key ingredients.” 37 The Court concluded that accommodating Martin’s disability by letting him ride in a cart would not fundamentally alter the game or give him an unfair advantage.

Justice Antonin Scalia disagreed. In a spirited dissent, he rejected the notion that the Court could determine the essential nature of golf. His point was not simply that judges lack the authority or competence to decide the question. He challenged the Aristotelian premise underlying the Court’s opinion—that it is possible to reason about the telos, or essential nature of a game:

To say that something is “essential” is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement (that is what distinguishes games from productive activity), it is quite impossible to

say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is “essential.” 38

Since the rules of golf “are (as in all games) entirely arbitrary,” Scalia wrote, there is no basis for critically assessing the rules laid down by the PGA. If the fans don’t like them, “they can withdraw their patronage.” But no one can say that this or that rule is irrelevant to the skills that golf is meant to test.

Scalia’s argument is questionable on several grounds. First, it disparages sports. No real fan would speak of sports that way—as governed by totally arbitrary rules and having no real object or point. If people really believed that the rules of their favorite sport were arbitrary rather than designed to call forth and celebrate certain skills and talents worth admiring, it would be hard for them to care about the outcome of the game. Sport would fade into spectacle, a source of amusement rather than a subject of appreciation.

Second, it’s perfectly possible to argue the merits of different rules, and to ask whether they improve or corrupt the game. These arguments take place all the time—on radio call-in shows and among those who govern the game. Consider the debate over the designated-hitter rule in baseball. Some say it improves the game by enabling the best hitters to bat, sparing weak-hitting pitchers the ordeal. Others say it damages the game by overemphasizing hitting and removing complex elements of strategy. Each position rests on a certain conception of what baseball at its best is all about: What skills does it test, what talents and virtues does it celebrate and reward? The debate over the designated-hitter rule is ultimately a debate about the telos of baseball—just as the debate over affirmative action is a debate about the purpose of the university.

Finally, Scalia, by denying that golf has a telos, misses altogether the honorific aspect of the dispute. What, after all, was the four-year saga over the golf cart really about? On the surface, it was an argument about fairness. The PGA and the golfing greats claimed that allowing Martin to ride would give him an unfair advantage; Martin replied that, given his disability, the cart would simply level the playing field.

If fairness were the only thing at stake, however, there is an easy and obvious solution: let all golfers use carts in the tournaments. If everyone can ride, the fairness objection disappears. But this solution was anathema to professional golf, even more unthinkable than making an exception for Casey Martin. Why? Because the dispute was less about fairness than about honor and recognition—specifically the desire of the PGA and top golfers that their sport be recognized and respected as an athletic event.

Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are somewhat sensitive about the status of their game. It involves no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. No one doubts that golf is a demanding game of skill. But the honor and recognition accorded great golfers depends on their sport being seen as a physically demanding athletic competition. If the game at which they excel can be played while riding in a cart, their recognition as athletes could be questioned or diminished. This may explain the vehemence with which some professional golfers opposed Casey Martin’s bid for a cart. Here is Tom Kite, a twenty-five-year veteran of the PGA Tour, in an op-ed piece in The New York Times:

It seems to me that those who support Casey Martin’s right to use a cart are ignoring the fact that we are talking about a competitive sport… . We are talking about an athletic event. And anyone who doesn’t think professional golf is an athletic sport simply hasn’t been there or done

that. 39

Whoever is right about the essential nature of golf, the federal case over Casey Martin’s cart offers a vivid illustration of Aristotle’s theory of justice. Debates about justice and rights are often, unavoidably, debates about the purpose of social institutions, the goods they allocate, and the virtues they honor and reward. Despite our best attempts to make law neutral on such questions, it may not be possible to say what’s just without arguing about the nature of the good life.