I don’t really know what I’m looking for with this thread. I decided immediately after starting it that I needed to go ahead and order a couple dozen Kirkland golf balls, so it’s accomplished that much at least. And I’m interested in the responses so far.
Kyle says golf is not dying, and maybe he’s right. But there’s no doubt that the game has experienced nearly a decade of significant decline that has persisted even as other economic indicators have improved. In the past, golf participation has ebbed and flowed with the economy, and maybe the same will prove true again should the economy improve more dramatically, but golf is clearly struggling for the time being.
I think a lot of the reasons it’s struggling are obvious and have been discussed to death already. Peter’s suggestion that the game would flourish if we all plugged into our local clubs is a romantic idea, but my last year at my local club was a $7500 expense once the dues, F&B minimums, caddie fees, locker fees, trail fees, tree management fund, capital fund, and finally, the operational assessment bills had all been paid. So I dropped my local private membership and made a public course my “home” club. And while Peter’s ideals could theoretically still be pursued through engaging with that public course and treating it like a true home club, it doesn’t really work in practice when the course is jammed with excruciatingly slow league play every weekday from 3:30p-dark during 7 of the 8 decent golfing months of the year, and when rounds on weekends are five hours at minimum unless you tee off prior to 8a. At least I have my national club… until it (probably) closes next year to be razed for housing development because the land had just become too valuable to justify keeping a perennial Golfweek Top 100 Modern golf course on it. It’s a massive catch-22 that has trapped the game – the real threat to golf’s future is that courses keep taking more and more land for more and more length, and that land keeps becoming more and more valuable for purposes other than golf while the actual value of golf courses continues to fall.
But I could also be wrong, and that’s sort of the point of the thread I think (because even though I started it, I still don’t really know what the point will end up being, or even if there is one). Hoover’s argument that golf needs more affordable, decent, simple golf is one that I embrace. There’s one club about 12 minutes from my house that matches his description of the type of club we need more of. I expect to join it in the next year or two. But clubs like that are the exception rather than the rule. The one in my town is bolstered by nearly 6 decades of presciently practical club culture that emphasizes keeping costs down and avoiding debt while maintaining a great golf experience for members, and it’s also helped dramatically by the fact that the club has its own water supply which greatly reduces maintenance costs. I want to be optimistic that their model could be replicated by other courses in the area, but in truth, I’m skeptical. It’s not as simple as it sounds for courses already hampered by substantial debt and other poor past decisions to adopt a more affordable and practical membership model.
It also strikes me that the game’s modern “farm system” for new players has become the public course. I hear stories from past decades of how caddie programs introduced so many young people to the game, and it’s easy to imagine why. The best form of golf, in my experience, is club golf with a friendly wager among friends with Evans Scholar caddies. It’s easy to see how young people caddying are attracted to that version of the game that they’re constantly exposed to. But as caddie programs continue to vanish, fewer people come to the game through those programs and more and more new golfers are introduced to the game through public golf instead. And public golf often just sucks – there are plenty of exceptions, but the norm relative to private courses (certainly in my neck of the woods) is slow play, uninspired design, and poor turf conditions.
Which comes back to Matt MacIver’s post, which I love. The Millennial generation loves to point out when “You’re doing it wrong,” and Millennials value highbrow experiences at affordable prices. Sometimes the experience costs a little more than the alternative: the fast-casual dining craze has taken off because eating shitty fast food isn’t worth saving 2 bucks and 2 minutes, and craft beer is hot because drinking pisswater isn’t worth it when for 50% more cash you can get 5x the flavor and 1.5x the ABV. But Millennials are brilliant at finding ways to cut costs while also improving their experience: they cut the cord on cable because they can create an all-around better TV experience for 1/5 the cost, for example. If you’re going through the drive-thru at McDonald’s to pick up dinner, eating it at home with an ice cold can of America The Beer while watching cable, then you’re doing it wrong. But will anyone care enough about golf to try “doing it right,” when there’s so much short-term revenue wrapped up in continuing to do it wrong, bastardizing the game itself by offering benignly neglected courses as a core product while emphasizing ancillary revenue generators like carts to facilitate more ancillary revenue generators like coolers full of beer in hopes that players drink enough not to notice that the actual activity is more waiting on slow players and searching for balls than actual playing? I doubt it, but there could certainly be opportunity there. It’s easy to imagine a place like Rustic Canyon being overrun by a local golf renaissance spurred by walking bearded hipsters with push carts and flannel-patterned performance fabrics and Chuck Taylor’s with softspikes who decry the guys down the road at Trump LA who are “doing it wrong,” and it’s easy to imagine places like that becoming the norm until you think about how far the average public course experience is from Rustic’s ideal.