The End of Golf As We Know It?

[Mark_F]

Earlier this year in Melbourne there was a fuss in the media over someone having their application for membership to the Melbourne club (a gentleman's club, not a golf club), refused, apparently because he was jewish.  Amidst the predictable outrage, one of the newspapers anonymously interviewed two members and asked them why they would want to belong to an apparently anti-semitic club in this day and age.  

Their reply was because the club "was an oasis of decency in an increasingly vulgar world".

Isn't this one of golf's most desirable and seductive attributes?  To sink that final putt on the 18th green, then look back upon the rolling green fairway bathed in the golden glow of the day's last few minutes of light, having spent the previous 2 1/2 hours in a world without rap music, Britney Spears and The Osbournes, is for me as important as any score I may have posted.

Is not the glorious setting and solitude of Dornoch and Ballybunion equally as pleasing as the course itself?  

Yet we seem to be determined to follow the rest of world into oblivion.  Golf clubs that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to join, some golfers forever screaming for the course to be made ever longer, the greens ever faster, the fairways ever greener, irrespective of the wishes of Mother nature, who surely knows best.

The noxious cancer of golf carts spread like a tumour, not just at those hundred thousand dollar clubs, but upscale public, bringing with them a generation of yobbos who feel that a swift hit and putt and a bouncy ride is somehow golf, somehow exercise, something that will benefit mind and body in the same manner.

Golf courses are increasingly managed by interest-only-in-the-bottom-line corporations like Troon Golf, ClubCorp and IMG, where $100 dollar plus green fees are the norm.  I realise that to American, and a slightly lesser degree, British, golfers, $100 may be the norm, but here it is not.  It is one of the reasons I hope the AGU's Moonah Links development "fails" in its aims.  Currently $75 per round, rumoured to be $100 when the clubhouse is complete, will it mean that the owners of the glorious, and far superior, The Dunes, not two minutes drive further along the road, feel they may be able to get away with $70?

Club manufacturers spew forth a never-ending range of go-faster balls, go-further clubs, stop-softer irons, and apparently there are enough clowns out there willing to partake of $1000 dollars plus for a titanium driver in the belief that it will do more for their game than a few regular lessons (that the time saved riding carts should give them), or a regular stretching routine. (Which, as a sidebar, is more likely to ensure you won't need to rely on someone else to wipe your arse when you're 85).  Which should be a consideration.

Shouldn't the recent fuss of Augusta National's membership focus be not on its lack of the fairer sex, but its lack of numbers?  Why should one of golf's four most covetted prizes (forgetting for the moment Tiger Woods' signature), be played at a club that believes there are only 300 people in a nation of 265 million worthy enough to join?

Similarly, should the USGA and R&A be holding their respective championships at clubs like Shinnecock Hills and Muirfield, which have approximately the same number of members?

Golf is supposed to be  better than this.  All of the afficionados of GCA sound like the exact type of people you hope you join up with on a tee somewhere, for an hour or two of their company is surely one of the reasons the game was invented.  

Progress is not always for the better, is it?

 

[Kevin_Reilly]

I'd respond, but I'll have to admit that I don't understand your point(s).

[Tim Weiman]

Mark F:

I travel overseas hoping to find what we have lost here in the States. But, unfortunately we are exporting our bad habits and slowly corrupting golf in the UK & Ireland and Australia.

A few years ago I sat in the Marine Hotel in Ballybunion listening to some Americans argue over whether it was possible to play a round of golf in less than five hours!

That's the mentality you are headed toward if you don't consciously work to keep American influence at bay.

[RJ_Daley]

Mark F., I think I understand your points well enough.  I think you are focusing on those negative aspects (negative in my opinion) that have continued to position the game of golf into the arena of the exclusive, private, and somewhat unwelcoming atmosphere of the private club environment.  Those aspects can be the condescending manner in which they view outsiders and the less priveledged public or their aristocrtic and elite pack driven mentality and misperception that a course should be pristinely perfect and maintained lie their finest estate grounds and gardens.   While we present events like "our national championship" and the "open" as sport and competition that is open to all skilled public golfers who can qualify, we hold and build those events traditions around the ones with the highest fences and gates.  To the USGA's credit, their move to go public at Bethpage and Torrey are the best signal sent out in years, IMHO.  

And, we lament that the game is not growing in numbers.  Yet, those that play and get drawn into the fine points of the game wind up having to live in the world of exclusivity and private - elite clubs if we want to enjoy the best of the game from the architectural connossieurs side.  It is distasteful and regrettable that some of the finest golf courses are associated with some of the most exclusionary and seemingly prejudiced clubs.  

Yet, I have posted on here before that those clubs have the "right" to exclude whom ever they want.  I don't like it, but I have to stick by my understanding of our constitutional right to privacy, and free associations, and free speech, that they can do so if they wish.  It just don't create the kind of atmosphere that would be conducive to long term growth and appreciation by the mainstream of people to couch many of the main events of the traditions of the game and so much ballyhooing of the architectural merits of the great private courses when the vast majority of people will never get to experience them because of price or exclusivity.

Can you possibly have popular growth and appreciation of all that is good in the game if it is coupled with exclusive and expensive traditions?  

[Mike_Cirba]

Mark_F;

I don't see what the rest of your post has to do with the denial of a Jewish candidate's application to join a club.

A private club certainly has the right to admit or decline any application for whatever grounds they deem appropriate, but...

I have yet to see a case where the opening of a membership to diverse ethnic and religious populations has anything to do with "the end of golf as we know it", much less the other negatives in the modern game that you listed.  

Quite the contrary, I believe.    

[RJ_Daley]

Mike, I wonder if the reverse of that isn't more accurate.  Not,  'the end of golf as we know it', but the continuation of golf as we have known it.  This is not to make an absolute statement of negativity.  Only recognising the negative aspects that effect the promotion/growth of golf as a game, appreciation of its best architecture as it relates to the joy of playing those great designs, and the joy of uninhibited association with various kindred spirits who also love these aspects.  

While the incident of exclusion of the Jewish person seems to be what sets Mark off.  He goes on to point out other factors that he thinks signals the end of golf as we know it, or he knows it...  I do think there is a common thread in the mentality Mark cites that has caused those clubs to hold fast to the desires to "keep up with the Jones and their perfectly pristine golf course and club membership, so that ours shall be perfect too...  Mike, don't you think that some of that mentality is what causes memberships to remodel what was great in the name of keeping up to the aura and ambiance and even the playability of what they perceive as better clubs because they are prettier, more modern, longer to keep up with the best technology driven design, and have a more glamorous membership, etc.?  The same be said of public CCFADs in most aspects as stated above for private clubs...

[Matt_Cohn]

I think Mark gave us a bit more background than he probably should have... If I understand right, the point of his post is about decency and peacefulness, not about anti-Semitism or discrimination. I think he should have just used the quote and maybe kept us in the dark about its context!

That said, if anti-Semitism IS what he meant by "one of golf's most desirable and seductive attributes," then f--- that. But I don't think he did.

You're just talking about how we're taking the joys of the game and corrupting them and making them inaccessible for the majority of the people in the world...right Mark? Please tell us that's what you meant?!

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just clarifying.

[Craig_Rokke]

Mark-
I'll admit that I'm a little confused by your post as well.
Just a couple ?'s-

1. Are you saying you never use a cart? I know I consider myself a spry, 39 year old semi-purist, and I sometimes appreciate a cart on certain courses.

2. Don't you think that there are other economic factors at work in the formulation of greens fee prices other than
big corporations interested only in the bottom line?

3. Are you still using Spalding blades from the 70's and wound Kro-Flyte balls? I know I'm not. I enjoy hitting it as well
as I'm capable of. The game's enough of a challenge for me without using decent, modern equipment.

4. Do you really care how many members Augusta and some of these other clubs have? There are plenty of places for everyone to play out there in the big world of golf. I don't
feel that the size of a club's membership should have any bearing on its hosting a tournament. Hell, it'd be nice to be one of the 300, though, wouldn't it?

5. I don't support discrimination, but I firmly believe that a club should be able to decide, by itself,  who gets in.

Didn't R.E.M. do a tune about thread's title?


In reading some of the other replies, if you're contending that golf is more exclusionary than ever, then I'll buy that to a point. I do feel that, at least in the states, the percentage of
course that are publicly-accessible goes up every single year. I think that public course construction has out-paced private for quite some time now. At least that's my impression.

[Mike_Cirba]

Dick/Matt/Craig;

Perhaps I misunderstood Mark_F's post, because I found myself agreeing with most of his well-made points.

I just couldn't get past the initial context he mentioned and hopefully he'll clarify because I still don't see what the particular example of exclusionary practices he mentioned at the start of his thread has to do with the remainder of his solidly presented points.

[RJ_Daley]

Mike, I've re-read Mark's first post a few times more and I think he is leaning towards the notion that the furor over the seemingly exclusionary practices is overshadowed by the other negatives that have crept into the game and golf scene.  My thoughts did perhaps go further than he was asking to discuss.  I will stand by my notion that exclusionary practices are one aspect of several others that to my mind intersect in their origin of attitude where certain other negative influences on the golf scene have flourished.  

I can see where being exclusionary can take on different conotations, however.  One kind of exclusionary is for lack of better words, snobbish and condescending and fosters the attitude and culture of hurtful behaviours of dicrimination.  In some instances that leads to an arrogant and inbred value system in which there never seems to progress anything from aesthetics to morality.  Clubs with those sort of cultural values seem to me to be the ones that might defile a beautiful old masterpiece if it meant keeping up with the perception of luxurious and beyond the reach of the masses, and to say theirs is and will remain somehow superior - in their mentality of what is superior.  

But, I guess there can also be highly exclusionary clubs that have a value system and culture that are so stodgy and conservative that they would scoff at any suggestion of change, and find their values in remaining unyielding to hints of modernization.  Their values may be keeping their course in the manner of its original intent, if a great architect designed for them a masterpiece.  Perhaps where it comes to golf architecture, some of us find a beauty in that sort of exclusive mentality as well.  Unfortunately, the only examples I can think of in that later exclusive and inbred membership model is the mythical Scrots Woods Club and the MacGReagor Clan's Links Club that David Feherty writes about in his humorous columns.  But in fairness, I think there must be many clubs in that very exclusionary, yet guardedly conservative mentality that preserve and restore and keep the games traditions as their highest purposes.  So, if they decide to keep their ranks to only WASPS over 65years old, and must have papers proving an ancestor was on the Mayflower, well that is still their right...  

But in either of the private club exclusionary examples, the game still can't grow to popular levels of participation.  It still remains in the realm of the elite by birth or wealth.  When public courses model after my first example of the "snobbish" clubs and their values of ostintateous luxury, they usually take on the aura of excluding the common everyday fellow with the incorporation of the ellusion of opulance and glitz over substance of playing enjoyability and tradition when it comes to the high priced architecture and maintenance.  

[Mark_F]

I did actually want to put in the question, Why is it so much of what is bad about golf SEEMS to eminate from America, but I didn't want to generalise, nor offend anyone...  

Mark F:

I travel overseas hoping to find what we have lost here in the States. But, unfortunately we are exporting our bad habits and slowly corrupting golf in the UK & Ireland and Australia.

A few years ago I sat in the Marine Hotel in Ballybunion listening to some Americans argue over whether it was possible to play a round of golf in less than five hours!

That's the mentality you are headed toward if you don't consciously work to keep American influence at bay.

[Mark_F]

Dear Mike, sorry, I didn't enunciate clearly.  I meant that two members were quoted as saying that the club was "an oasis of decency in an increasingly vulgar world".  
To me, that is one of the attractions of our game.  Played in beautiful surroundings devoid of the much of the crassness that increasingly strangles our lives.   yet that very same crassness is slowly encroaching.  vis a vis the relentless desire to make a buck ( 150-odd pounds sterling to play Wentworth?  it might not be very much in US dollars, but I'm telling you, in Aust. peso's, I could finance a sequel to Titanic and still have change).  I suppose I want both sides of the bread buttered, because I don't, as a matter of politics, have anything against that, it's just that it doesn't seem quite, well, golf.  

Mark_F;

I don't see what the rest of your post has to do with the denial of a Jewish candidate's application to join a club.

A private club certainly has the right to admit or decline any application for whatever grounds they deem appropriate, but...

I have yet to see a case where the opening of a membership to diverse ethnic and religious populations has anything to do with "the end of golf as we know it", much less the other negatives in the modern game that you listed.  

Quite the contrary, I believe.    

[Mark_F]

Exactly, Matt, I just think we are losing a semblance of what makes golf and its people so terrific, despite golf being a terribly frustrating game to play well.  Tennis, basketball, football in its myriad forms, baseball, cricket, are all played in similar surroundings, in no way comparable to the beauty of most golf courses.  And if I get the gist of a lot of other threads, in regards to constant lengthening etc, etc, etc, then I can't be the only one to feel a little saddened/frustrated.

I think Mark gave us a bit more background than he probably should have... If I understand right, the point of his post is about decency and peacefulness, not about anti-Semitism or discrimination. I think he should have just used the quote and maybe kept us in the dark about its context!

That said, if anti-Semitism IS what he meant by "one of golf's most desirable and seductive attributes," then f--- that. But I don't think he did.

You're just talking about how we're taking the joys of the game and corrupting them and making them inaccessible for the majority of the people in the world...right Mark? Please tell us that's what you meant?!

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just clarifying.

[John_D._Bernhardt]

Your point is made, but frankly it is way down the list of things i love about the game. I must confess to appreciation of the decency of a nice club. That has little to do with my love of golf though.

[Mark F]

Craig...

1) No, I've never used a cart, although after my first round at The Dunes, I thought my second round would require one.  
Most of the time I sling my bag over my shoulder, too...
I'm 37, so you only have a couple of years on me, but since I've spent 20 years as a Chef, I guarantee it's taken more out of me than you're job, since I feel 107...

2)No, not really.  to wit, The Old Course.  Currently, i believe, 100 pounds sterling to play a round.  I don't pretend to know a lot about the costs of course maintenance, but at the number of rounds they shovel through on it, someone, somewhere, is making a crap load of money.  And okay, it's a links trust, not clubcorp, but I think the point remains the same.  

3)no, but a lot of the times I use pretty crappy old balls, because I'm now a poor student and can't afford three new ProV-1's every time I play, and okay, the results obviously aren't as good as new balls, but it ain't that much difference.  Something tells me Phil and co., are either dreaming or lying. Or it's only every other one.

Mark-
I'll admit that I'm a little confused by your post as well.
Just a couple ?'s-

1. Are you saying you never use a cart? I know I consider myself a spry, 39 year old semi-purist, and I sometimes appreciate a cart on certain courses.

2. Don't you think that there are other economic factors at work in the formulation of greens fee prices other than
big corporations interested only in the bottom line?

3. Are you still using Spalding blades from the 70's and wound Kro-Flyte balls? I know I'm not. I enjoy hitting it as well
as I'm capable of. The game's enough of a challenge for me without using decent, modern equipment.

4. Do you really care how many members Augusta and some of these other clubs have? There are plenty of places for everyone to play out there in the big world of golf. I don't
feel that the size of a club's membership should have any bearing on its hosting a tournament. Hell, it'd be nice to be one of the 300, though, wouldn't it?

5. I don't support discrimination, but I firmly believe that a club should be able to decide, by itself,  who gets in.

Didn't R.E.M. do a tune about thread's title?


In reading some of the other replies, if you're contending that golf is more exclusionary than ever, then I'll buy that to a point. I do feel that, at least in the states, the percentage of
course that are publicly-accessible goes up every single year. I think that public course construction has out-paced private for quite some time now. At least that's my impression.

[Tim Weiman]

Guys:

It seems like Mark F's original post was interpreted differently by various readers.

I blew by the ethnic/racial bit without even thinking about it. So, let me be clear that I don't favor discrimination on such a basis.

My reaction to Mark's post was more about etiquette on the golf course and what I perceive to be a creeping negative American influence on the game throughout the world. Part of that influence is economic, specifically, our tendency to encourage things that increase the cost of playing the game.

Growing up, my father - and other adults - taught me to respect other people while out on the golf course. In short, they taught me to remember I was sharing the golf course with other people. Amongst other things, that means moving along!

Our mentality today is just the opposite. The CCFAD world fosters a mindset that "I've paid my greens fee.....I'll do what I want". That's the mindset I hope folks outside of the US will resist.

Americans should be learning from our golfing colleagues overseas, not the other way around.

[Rich Goodale (Guest)]

Was I the only one to find a huge amount of irony in the statement from the RM club member that their anti-semitism allowed them to be an "oasis of decency?"  "Oasis" is the proper word, but modifying it only demeans the modifier.  The "desert" within which these oases exist can only be defined uniquely to each of us, in our own minds.  To the degree that these definitions are discriminatory--except in reference to a love for our game--we are diminished, as is our game.

[GPazin]

Regarding the "exclusionary" policies of the courses often hosting the US Open (& of course ANGC & the Masters), I've always believed these policies are way overblown by both the media & the nongolfing public, & largely the result of overzealous lawyers & idiotic judges.

I'm not a member of any course ('till Greg Ramsey contacts me about Barnbougle ) & perhaps my background would make it highly unlikely that any of the biggies would even find me a desirable member, but I've always had faith in human nature. I believe the courses in question have memberships that likely developed for other reasons well in the past & the current membership is more a legacy driven byproduct of that, rather than any conspiratorial drive to deprive some group of the opportunity to play golf. I also believe that these clubs would be far more open to allowing outside play if a bunch of jackasses didn't seize every opportunity to attempt to sue or pressure clubs into positions where they have their membership policies dictated to them by the government.

There are certainly people of all backgrounds that contribute to GCA's discussion groups & they've certainly played many if not all of the world's great courses. I suspect most would tell you almost any course is open if you handle things correctly. Heck, a few people were even foolish enough to invite little 'ol me to play at their club simply because I sold them a little tee shirt.

As far as dollars & carts go, that's one of the tradeoffs of free market capitalism. MacDonald's isn't bribing governments to force people to buy their burgers, they simply open their doors & let the market decide. Same thing with big $$$ golf courses & golf carts. If you don't like 'em, vote with your pocket book. I have been employing this strategy for years with Pebble Beach & surely they will one day wake up & realize they miss me & will lower their greens fees.  

Contrary to what some people said about the market a few weeks & many threads ago, it's never wrong - you just have to ask it the right questions.

P.S. If you think being a chef is tough on the body, try printing tee shirts manually for 6 years. And I can't even begin to imagine what real manual laborers must go through. My grandfather worked in a steel mill for 42 years & would probably laugh himself out of his grave if he knew we were complaining about being chefs & tee shirt printers, etc.

[Dan Kelly]

Was I the only one to find a huge amount of irony in the statement from the RM club member that their anti-semitism allowed them to be an "oasis of decency?"

No, you were not.

"Gentlemen's" club, my arse!

Hear, hear to the rest of what you say -- with one exception: If there are vile bigots who love golf, and I have no doubt that there are, their vile bigotry does not diminish our game. It is not theirs to diminish.

[Rich Goodale (Guest)]

"If there are vile bigots who love golf, and I have no doubt that there are, their vile bigotry does not diminish our game. It is not theirs to diminish."

Very well said, Dan.

[Jeff_McDowell]

Regarding that REM song - the full verse is:

It's the end of the world as we know, and I feel fine.

To me golf is like religion - the idea is great, but people ruin it.