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Apparently you missed where you used the word "upper" or thought that it was equivalent to "lower," when in fact they are opposites. My apologies for this gentle correction if you are not a native english speaker.

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I am not a native speaker FWIW but "upper" is exactly what I wanted to say. My point was that if you replace football with golf and working class with upper class the whole idea of cultivating interest in sport to fit with some social group starts to sound really cheesy. And that author's "noble" intent is a fig leaf on what sounds like a rather pointless exercise to me. Although I cannot pinpoint exactly why.

(btw, I am not the one who downvoted you. HN got really trigger-happy lately)

I don't think it sounds cheesy, in fact there are tons of people who play golf (or at least only get into it) for the business and networking aspects of it. The difference is that building rapport with the upper class is probably seen as self-serving while building rapport with the lower class is maybe construed as altruistic, noble, self-sacrificing? It really comes down to common courtesy; if you are pleasant to rich upper class people it can be dismissed as sucking up; if you treat people in the lower class the same way, there's less room to dismiss it as anything but genuine niceness.

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