So much of what makes golf fascinating is completely undetectable to the untrained eye and it’s only when one tries to explain does it become obvious how much knowledge us golfers carry with us subconsciously.

Watching coverage of the Hong Kong Open at the weekend with a non-golf friend this became clear when Sang Moon Bae missed a green on the ‘short side’.

For most of us, this needs no explanation. But when asked to explain, it dawned on me that to the uninitiated pretty much all shots around the green look the same.

In fact, if your only exposure to golf was seeing it on television pretty much all shots DO look the same.

The player takes a swing of some length and the ball ends up somewhere near the hole. A flop shot to a short flag on a green several feet above the golfer looks basically the same as a flat 25-foot bump and run with a 9-iron.

And explaining all this succinctly is a good deal harder than you might imagine.

It’s a bit like a novice watching chess and all they see is the player picking up a piece and moving it. To the expert viewer that one move might indicate amazing foresight that will see the game end a few moves later.

So why does any of this matter? Partly because it helps to explain, I think, why us golfers find it so difficult to understand how non-golfers simply don’t ‘get it’.

When discussions turn to Moore Park or Oakleigh (or Cammeray in Sydney as it now seems they have) and making the case for keeping them, we golfers forget how much prior knowledge we bring.

The non golfer sees a beautiful park being used by a small group of people doing something which looks like a slightly more complex form of walking.

The joy of a well struck shot, the mental exercise of calculating yardages and lies and the camaraderie of watching friends both triumph and fail in a shared activity is completely lost on them.

"It’s a bit like a novice watching chess and all they see is the player picking up a piece and moving it. To the expert viewer that one move might indicate amazing foresight that will see the game end a few moves later."

And as much as I wish this column was edging towards some sort of epiphany that could solve this problem, it isn’t.

Short of getting golf clubs in people’s hands so they can experience it for themselves I’m not convinced there is a strategy that could work.

All of which only makes it more imperative for golfers everywhere to encourage as many people as they can to try the game.

Not everyone will love it, and some will even hate it. But at least if there is some understanding that it’s not just a ‘walk in the park’ then the pressure to turn golf courses into just that might ease a bit.

Hopefully.