TEEING OFF: BRENDAN JAMES
GOLF’S popularity has been called into question in recent years, with various domestic and international reports suggesting the game has lost its mojo with memberships dropping and a significant number of clubs feeling the financial pinch.
The game’s administrators in this country – Golf Australia and the PGA of Australia – whose task it is to grow the game, have not been helped along the way by sections of the mainstream media offering scant coverage because golf apparently lacks sex appeal. At a time when Australia has men and women winning on various Tours around the world, the biggest golf-related story that recently appeared in a Sydney newspaper was about the kiss Rickie Fowler planted on his girlfriend after winning the Players Championship. There was little or no mention the next week of Australian golfers – including young Minjee Lee’s pro breakthrough – winning on three Tours abroad. Perhaps even sadder for the wider coverage of the sport, here and in the United States in particular, is the view of some golf-specific magazines that the only way they will put a woman on the cover is if she is looking sexy. A topless Lexi Thompson on the cover of US Golf Digest did more to publicise the magazine than it did women’s golf. But I digress. Golf’s fight with other sports – behind the football codes, cricket and horse racing – for coverage will continue until there are genuine signs the game is once again the largest participant sport in the land.
There are plenty of great ideas being implemented to grow the game and make it an attractive sport for people of all ages. The strategies outlined in our feature, “Growing The Game” ( page 44) will hook a significant number of people – young and old – into playing golf on a regular basis.
The real challenge for clubs in turning back the tide and converting social golfers into new members is overcoming time and money issues. In relation to money, it has to be said Australia remains one of the most affordable places in the world to play golf.
Being able to afford and substantiate holding a club membership is another kettle of fish, though. That said, a growing number of wellmanaged clubs are becoming pro-active in finding new ways of boosting their member ranks by making their fees more affordable. Weekly and monthly membership dues payments are becoming more common, as are discounts for 18- to 25-year-olds who might be studying or have low-paying jobs.
Affordability goes hand-in-hand with the time issue. Faced with a Saturday round of more than five hours, some golf club members stop playing as regularly then soon question the worth of their membership. A five-hour-plus round also draws into conflict with family commitments, which was one of the main findings of the recently released R&A pace of play survey.
The survey also revealed that while 70 percent of golfers are largely happy with the duration of their rounds, 60 percent of golfers expressed the view that they would enjoy golf more if they played in less time.
Importantly, for 25- to 44-year-olds who said they were never happy with pace of play, 21 percent of respondents said golf would need to take as much as one-and-a-half hours less for them to play more often.
Of the 8,468 golfers in this age range who responded, 19 percent said they would welcome the opportunity to play nine holes more often as an alternative format. Nine-hole golf, while it has its good points, sidesteps the real issue, which is slow play. What is the point of introducing an abbreviated version of the game if that nine-hole round takes more than three hours to play?
Slow play has seen average 18-hole rounds blow out from an easy walking three-and-a-half hours to more than five. I have said it before, I have never met a golfer who admits to being slow, yet the game – from the grass roots through to the PGA Tour – is full of snails.
What many club and casual golfers don’t realise is that it is the little things you do during a round that add up to a round being long. For example, you and your playing partners have just putted out and, as you start walking off the green, you start marking the card. It might take you between 45 seconds and a minute to ask each player their score and fill it in on the card. Do that on every hole and you have made that round nearly 18 minutes longer.
Educating golfers on what they can do to speed up their rounds is being addressed at club level with many promoting ‘ready golf’, which was a revealing aspect of Golf Australia’s Pace Of Play report released in April.
Every shareholder with an interest in golf’s health and well-being recognises that shorter rounds will, ultimately, help grow the game from the grass roots up. Shorter rounds … we all want them so we can play more often and bring more players for life into the sport, thus silencing the game’s naysayers. Move along, people!