First it was neoliberals at home and in America. Then it was their supporters in the media. Now Venezuela's Hugo Chávez has his sights fixed on the real threat to his "Bolivarian Revolution" - golf.

“Let's get this clear," Chávez declared in a recent TV appearance, "golf is a bourgeois sport." El Presidente is particularly vexed by two courses sited on real estate that could be used for public housing. "Do you mean to tell me," he said, "this is a people's sport?"

There probably aren't many on the left in Britain who would disagree. For many, it is hard to shake images of Brucie, Tarby and the late Denis Thatcher in the members' bar trading reactionary opinions over gin and tonics. But while Chávez is speaking out, socialism's other torchbearer, Cuba, is doing all it can to attract golfers. In 1962, Fidel Castro took on - and lost to - Che Guevara in a round. In a perhaps not unrelated development, he then had one course turned into a military school and another into an art school. Now Castro's brother Raúl, in an effort to boost Cuba's failing economy, has approved a plan to promote golf tourism.

I suspect it is golf's association with a certain former US president that really lies behind the antipathy the game inspires on the left. It was George W Bush whom the US Ryder Cup captain Ben Crenshaw invited to address his struggling team in 1999. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore uses a clip of Bush clowning around on the course to portray Bush as a goofball.

I doubt either Moore or Chávez has ever played the sport. If they had, they might see how the handicap system allows weaker golfers to compete with stronger ones - the redistributive principle in action. A visit to any course or tournament would prove that all classes and ages and both genders are now represented.

There is something else. I once asked the great golfer Jack Nicklaus what lessons the game held. "Golf is one of the few sports where you just don't win all of the time," he said. "That's good for [children] to learn, because that's how life is.

“The other point is that kids grow up when they are on a golf course. You're actually playing alongside and competing with adults. So, through playing golf, kids learn how to act and behave around older people; the game teaches them to become better citizens from a young age. It also teaches you about sportsmanship, about the right values of winning and losing and how to deal with both."

Nick Greenslade is deputy sports editor of the Sunday Times.