BBC has vital role to play in protecting golf ’s future

As the Open loses millions of viewers by switching to Sky, the state broadcaster must work hard to attract the younger generation with its coverage elsewhere

The Royal & Ancient’s labelling of the BBC’S golf coverage as “tired and outdated” must be the clearest instance of the pot calling the kettle black since Donald Trump described Hillary Clinton at an Iowa rally as “pretty close to unhinged”. This is an institution whose former chief executive, Peter Dawson, said in 2013 of Muirfield’s then men-only membership policy: “It’s a way of life that some people rather like.” Even a blustering brigadier would have struggled to commit such public relations hara-kiri.

Mercifully, the R&A has since passed into its own Age of Enlightenment, voting by a clear majority to permit women into its ranks and to remove any club daring to exclude half the population from the Open roster. But in the same way an oil tanker takes an eternity to turn around, a 263-year-old governing body cannot become a dazzling beacon of progress overnight. There is much to do, not least in enticing a younger demographic to watch a sport whose stars routinely take five and a half hours to play a three-ball.

Scotland’s Richie Ramsay claimed recently the R&A had been “asleep at the wheel” on this front. Apt, then, that it should be led by a gentleman called Martin Slumbers.

It was gratuitous of Slumbers to lacerate the BBC so publicly this week. For a start, the timing was off, when the BBC has just secured a remarkable coup in prising the rights to next month’s USPGA at Quail Hollow from under Sky’s noses, due to an impasse in negotiations. Slumbers’ press conference came across as little more than free advertising for the Open’s host broadcaster, about whose Bafta award he even waxed lyrical. “We’re very comfortable working with a partner that understands golf, understands the technology,” he said. Did this eulogy have anything to do with the fact that Barney Francis, Sky Sports’ managing director, was in the audience?

What Slumbers fails to articulate with any conviction is how the migration of golf ’s oldest and grandest championship to pay TV benefits the game more broadly. “I don’t buy the argument around participation and reach,” he said, which is a little like a bank chief not buying all the talk about customers and profits. There is no more fundamental challenge for golf in this country than to redress the precipitous decline in the number of those playing, from 4.08million in 2006 to 2.78million in 2016. The question is how this cause can be advanced in any way by showing the Open on a subscription channel.

True, the Sky presentation is rich, exhaustive and never less than diligent in reinforcing a connection between the glorious talent of Jordan Spieth and the amateur game. But viewing figures for last year’s Open at Royal Troon did little to encourage belief in golf ’s capacity to flourish on a non-terrestrial platform. The mesmerising duel between Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson, who pulled 11 strokes clear of their nearest rivals in some of the finest sport in years, was watched by 1.1million. Even the BBC’S highlights package, drawing 1.5million, fared better. For their last live offering in 2015, when a wind-buffeted Open at St Andrews wound up on a Monday, the figure was 4.7million.

On that occasion, alas, it gave ready ammunition to Slumbers’ “outdated” barb, beginning its live broadcast hours late, preferring instead to show Bargain

Hunt and Homes Under the Hammer. The impression was that its heart was no longer in the sport itself. out of tonight’s Diamond League race in Monaco to protect Bolt’s supremacy.

While that idea is denied by Bolt’s management, it does raise the idea of whether he has carried on for the right reasons. He has admitted extending his career only at the behest of his sponsor, Puma, who pay him £7 million a year, and the latest murmurs of line-ups being crafted to suit him do his greatness a grave disservice.