[Ronald Montesano]

The Golden Bear has give his opinion here, and it's not a new one (http://www.mygolfspy.com/jack-nicklaus-says-golf-ball-is-reason-golf-courses-are-closing/)


I like that MGS calls out "the industry" for always turning to the same 3-5 great ones for pronouncement on what ails the game. We know why they do (hint: they sell tickets).


MGS suggests that a devolution is not the answer. Do the folks around the GCA block agree or disagree? How many more courses need to close before balance is returned to the force?

[A.G._Crockett]

With no disrespect intended to one of the greats, I always disregard anything Mr. Nicklaus has to say about either the golf ball or what is hurting golf.

I think most agree that the two biggest problems in golf are time and cost.  This is only the opinion of one, but I can't think of another person living or dead who has done MORE that Mr. Nicklaus to make golf slower AND more expensive.

I don't mean to say that he committed the crime, but he was in the building when it occurred.  And he was well-compensated for his part in it, for that matter!

[Nick_Christopher]

The fact that the ball travels much farther than it used to because of better club and ball technology - increases the time it takes to play and the cost of a round.  Pulling a ball off the tee and having it go 20-30 yards farther results in more balls lost and longer searches.   The need to have more real estate drives costs up significantly.  I believe these are the factors that Jack was alluding to.

Having said that - I also agree that his own personal style of slow play that was mimicked by a generation of golfers has been a big contributor!

[Mike_Young]

Just like many say the election made them realize there were people otu there who had not been heard...well golf is the same...

I just saw Mona, World Golf Federation etc ( whatever the hell that is) making a big announcement that they were preparing to do metrics on the game and all aspects and also the fan and all aspects...so much of the industry today is a farce...all of these groups like the World Golf Federation get monies form the large manufacturers etc in order to do reports and other crap that is of no use to the real game...I still see kids going thru 5-6 years of school to become golf architects and yet they know there are not 10 new courses a year...kids with four year degrees wanting to become golf professionals when there are not 500 good jobs and the executive director of the PGA mkes 2.5 mill...

from today's Pellucid Report

A recent headline in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Restaurants Burned by Oversupply" elicited a mild sense of Schadenfreude (pleasure derived by the misfortune of others) in my mind as I related that to the struggles and situation we've been fighting in the golf industry for over a decade.  On the one hand, it helps me rationalize that golf is not unique in the situation we created for ourselves; that of building supply without any quantitative support for increased demand.  On the other hand it's slightly comical that golf has gotten the "industry in the rough" or the more provocative "golf is dead" banner ad from the media in reaction to our situation while restaurants are simply "burned" in media coverage or they describe the seismic shifts in retail as a normal, cyclical correction.

Be that as it may, in this issue we'll take a look at some of the parallels between golf and the "rightsizing" of other industries, what's common and we can learn from and what's unique to the disposal of a golf course asset vs. restaurants and retail stores:

Restaurant industry contraction is similar in magnitude (~1% annual reduction) and elongation (it's 5-10 years from equilibrium) to what we've experienced in golf
The Retail industry is a unique combination of myriad new formats, channel shifting between physical and virtual stores and a moderation of demand which makes is reflected more in the golf retail stores sector of our industry vs. our facility supply-demand challenge
Looking at the preview of supply change for '16 from the Internet Golf Course Database (IGDB) resource, the closure pace is picking up but the absence of demand growth keeps moving the equilibrium goalposts further back as well
The net storyline is that we're not alone in our current supply-demand imbalance among US industries but we do have some unique constraints on rebalancing by which other "smaller-fooprint" industries such as restaurants, retail and hotels aren't similarly encumbered.  The other unique challenge we face is that food spending isn't necessarily discretionary while other industries like retail generally show consistent growth in all but dire economic circumstances.  Golf, on the other hand, is considerably more influenced by discretionary time and spending decisions so there's no underlying foundation for golf stability, let alone growth absent what we drive. To paraphrase an old advertising tagline, "We create demand the old-fashioned way, we earn it."

We need to just leave it alone and let all of the "top 40 People in Golf" keep going to their conferences and patting each others backs...

[John Murray Jr.]

The fact that the ball travels much farther than it used to because of better club and ball technology - increases the time it takes to play and the cost of a round.  Pulling a ball off the tee and having it go 20-30 yards farther results in more balls lost and longer searches.   The need to have more real estate drives costs up significantly.  I believe these are the factors that Jack was alluding to.

Having said that - I also agree that his own personal style of slow play that was mimicked by a generation of golfers has been a big contributor!

Doesn't that assume that people can't play the game?  In other words, for the people that can actually hit the ball (generally or most of the time where they intend to) wouldn't the opposite be true?  Then an extra 20-30 yards per shot actually speeds the game up because more ground can be covered with less shots?


As far as cost of golf balls - so Nicklaus proposes courses use 50% or 75% balls tailored to each course?  So, then I need to buy golf balls at each course in order to play a round?  That seems more expensive to me since I, luckily, do not lose many golf balls.  In addition, why would I want to play a course when I have no idea how far I will hit any particular shot at that course because my golf ball is constantly changing?  Wouldn't that actually slow the game down as now even the better players are missing greens and hitting hazards that normally would not be a problem because no one has any idea how far their ball will actually go?


Finally, I can see how distance makes courses more expensive to BUILD (because more land is needed).  However, distance of a golf ball does not to me force a course that is already open to close.  Are there really that many players out there who say, Gee this course is really too short for me now because I hit a Pro-V1 and a couple years later THAT causes the course to close?  The logic does not seem to follow for me.  The whole "tee it forward" movement must be completely off the mark by suggesting players move up to speed up the game only to then give them a ball that goes 50% as far as what they had the day before at the same course.

[Sean_A]

.....there are too many courses for the current economy to support.  All the other talk is just talk.


Ciao

[Joe Hellrung]

Assuming the golf ball or golf club tech is the problem and new rules were instituted to mandate balls that don't go as far, I fail to see how you can put the genie back in the bottle and make the game more playable/walkable/time consuming.  If the majority of courses out there have been designed or redesigned to compensate for the length that tech provides, so how are you going to "fix" those courses once the distance governors are in place?  Will I have to walk/drive my cart 50+ yards further on each hole to reach the tee box?  For some courses, such as neighborhood courses built over the last 30 years, shortening the course is impossible without creating a lot of dead space between holes. 

[J_ Crisham]

2 Major Reasons why golf is declining are: Females now have full time careers and the cost of College is astronomical.
Back in the 50's-70's the country club life had the wife and kids spending most Summer days at the pool , tennis courts or on the course with Dad joining them after work and on the weekends. With women working long hours it's a tough sell on the weekend these days to try to escape to the club for 6 hrs with guys . The rounds of golf played become very expensive if you aren't at the club often. It becomes a tough sell also of your wife doesn't play golf.
      The incredible rise in college and grad school costs has had it's effect on disposable income. Parents are needing to put away $200K per child these days just for undergrad. Assuming an outlay of $500K per family to educate your kids it becomes simple math- golf becomes disposable . Rarely do I hear these 2 factors discussed.

[A.G._Crockett]

The fact that the ball travels much farther than it used to because of better club and ball technology - increases the time it takes to play and the cost of a round.  Pulling a ball off the tee and having it go 20-30 yards farther results in more balls lost and longer searches.   The need to have more real estate drives costs up significantly.  I believe these are the factors that Jack was alluding to.

Having said that - I also agree that his own personal style of slow play that was mimicked by a generation of golfers has been a big contributor!

Many years ago, Bill James (the father of baseball metrics) wrote something to the effect that if you make a claim that there is an elephant walking around in the snow your yard, you'll need to be able to show some tracks.

I'm going to have to see some sort of a metric on the idea that the distance a golf ball travels and the problems that the golf industry is seeing are causation and not just correlation.  The fact that Jack Nicklaus says it doesn't make it so; he's just another guy with an opinion, and with more of an agenda than most, for that matter.

Think of it this way:  If I had to play most of my golf at one of Jack's early designs, for big bucks and with golfers who play at Jack's pace of play, it would be enough to make me quit the game.  And it wouldn't matter to me how far the ball did (or didn't go).

[Adrian_Stiff]

.....there are too many courses for the current economy to support.  All the other talk is just talk.


Ciao

100% correct, but the next step is to identify the reasons why there are less rounds of golf played than before.
Here are a few, and there may be lot's more.


Time it takes to play the game.
Cost to play the game.
Less available time due to modern life pressures.
TV attractions now missing the big names, Tiger-Faldo-Nicklaus.
Game has become boring.
Courses have become boring.


Golf will always have to compete with other sports and past-times for it's market share.

[A.G._Crockett]

.....there are too many courses for the current economy to support.  All the other talk is just talk.


Ciao

Correct.

Occam's Razor applies here.  Golf just has a terrible demographic for growth right now, and participation will likely continue to drop back toward pre-boom numbers of rounds for some years to come yet.  Fewer rounds means fewer courses; that's pretty simple math. 

Whether or not the ball flies to far is open to debate.  That the distance a ProV1 travels causes courses to close is well past silly.

[jeffwarne]

.....there are too many courses for the current economy to support.  All the other talk is just talk.


Ciao

+1


Even crazies like me who advocate a rollback/bifurcation don't think "the ball" is causing courses to close.


IMHO "the Ball"(perhaps wrongfully) is causing newer course developers to use gross amounts of real estate and build silly amounts of tees.
additionally older courses build more tees that cost money and take more time to play.
Both contribute to some players choosing to play less due to the sheer amount (on average)of time and money it takes to play the game-as well as the misguided choices some architects/developers make to "protect par" and or make magazine photos

[BCowan]

I love reading about the glory days of private golf in the 50's-70's    .  When there was no upscale public.  There was run down muni or expensive private to choose from.  Now for every 1 private you have 5 publics to choose from which many now are maint closer to private standards then 50 years ago.  Private clubs back then had a flawed model that could sustain itself very well due to no competition.  Then Caddie Shack came out and the idea of eating dinner at the CC became rather a drag.  Especially since many towns and cities experienced restaurant booms.  Those restaurants don't pay their managers $200,000+ to maint a facility for basically 6 months season that most drag out to 11 months.   My mother just turned in my parents letter of resignation and locker keys yesterday, after 38 years.  They took a leave last year going from playing a Doak 5.5 to a bunch of Doak 3's publics.  I haven't seen them this happy in decades.

I hear the constant drivel of rounds on the decline, where?  Washtenaw GC was one of the first 20 private clubs in the state of Michigan.  Just went public this year, did 19,000 rounds compared to last year private 8,000.  The membership wasn't priced right.  My friend is a keeper of a course that used to do 15,000 rounds, now they are doing 21,000 and they are trying to cut them back.  I've tried to explain for years how the individual model is much superior to the Family membership model, which has fallen on def ears.  People just can't seem to grasp that there are more tee times outside of Sat morning 730-10am tee slot. 

Ravisloe (public) and Washtenaw(public), and South Bend CC and Muskegon CC are now privately owned and doing great.  It's rather simple, members have no clue what they are doing, they don't run the club like a business.

Please someone name a course that their rounds are decreasing, please let it not be a dog track???



 

[Adrian_Stiff]

.....there are too many courses for the current economy to support.  All the other talk is just talk.


Ciao

100% correct, but the next step is to identify the reasons why there are less rounds of golf played than before.
Here are a few, and there may be lot's more.


Time it takes to play the game.
Cost to play the game.
Less available time due to modern life pressures.
TV attractions now missing the big names, Tiger-Faldo-Nicklaus.
Game has become boring.
Courses have become boring.


Golf will always have to compete with other sports and past-times for it's market share.

[Jonathan Mallard]

.....there are too many courses for the current economy to support.  All the other talk is just talk.


Ciao

Correct, as others have already noted.


I'll also point out that the NFL is grumbling about lower viewership numbers.


I think that increasingly, they are dependent on fantasy sports participants to become a larger percentage of their TV audience.

[Tom_Doak]

One of the reasons clubs in the US are failing is that membership limits are too small.  Since each member plays less than they used to, a private club should be selling more memberships at a lesser price - as they do in Australia or the UK. 


Trying to maintain "exclusivity " is something most clubs can't afford.  But the knock on effect of this is if membership rolls are bigger, we don't need as many private clubs.  More consolidation is still necessary.

[Ryan Hillenbrand]

2 Major Reasons why golf is declining are: Females now have full time careers and the cost of College is astronomical.
Back in the 50's-70's the country club life had the wife and kids spending most Summer days at the pool , tennis courts or on the course with Dad joining them after work and on the weekends. With women working long hours it's a tough sell on the weekend these days to try to escape to the club for 6 hrs with guys . The rounds of golf played become very expensive if you aren't at the club often. It becomes a tough sell also of your wife doesn't play golf.
      The incredible rise in college and grad school costs has had it's effect on disposable income. Parents are needing to put away $200K per child these days just for undergrad. Assuming an outlay of $500K per family to educate your kids it becomes simple math- golf becomes disposable . Rarely do I hear these 2 factors discussed.

Great point

And Nicklaus must assume everyone out playing is of tour caliber or low handicap. I've been playing for 30 years, and my 97 mph swing speed has gained me about 0-10 yards with the new balls. I play Pro Vs because I like their feel around the greens, but I'm still happy to see 360 yard par 4s.

[Terry Lavin]

One of the reasons clubs in the US are failing is that membership limits are too small.  Since each member plays less than they used to, a private club should be selling more memberships at a lesser price - as they do in Australia or the UK. 


Trying to maintain "exclusivity " is something most clubs can't afford.  But the knock on effect of this is if membership rolls are bigger, we don't need as many private clubs.  More consolidation is still necessary.

There's surely merit in this suggestion, but the number of those interested in joining private clubs in the Chicago area, for example, isn't going up, it's going down.  On the South Side, where the middle and upper middle class has been devastated by the Bush-induced recession, there isn't a single club that has a waiting list.  So, we're not suffering because we are limiting the number of members, we're suffering because we can't even fill our desired number of members.  In response, all clubs have drastically reduced initiation fees, some to the point that they let members in for next to nothing, just to get the monthly dues revenues.  But those kind of trunkslammer members don't have much of a track record of remaining members for more than a season or two.  Clubs are closing because it has taken eight years to come to some semblance of recovery from the $6 trillion spent on two unnecessary wars and the $7 trillion lost in the housing crash.  The middle and upper middle classes suffered the brunt of these losses.  They will have decades of distress while the 1%ers had a bad year or two.  Damage to the club industry is just one manifestation of this distress.

[Ian Mackenzie]

One of the reasons clubs in the US are failing is that membership limits are too small.  Since each member plays less than they used to, a private club should be selling more memberships at a lesser price - as they do in Australia or the UK. 


Trying to maintain "exclusivity " is something most clubs can't afford.  But the knock on effect of this is if membership rolls are bigger, we don't need as many private clubs.  More consolidation is still necessary.

There's surely merit in this suggestion, but the number of those interested in joining private clubs in the Chicago area, for example, isn't going up, it's going down.  On the South Side, where the middle and upper middle class has been devastated by the Bush-induced recession, there isn't a single club that has a waiting list.  So, we're not suffering because we are limiting the number of members, we're suffering because we can't even fill our desired number of members.  In response, all clubs have drastically reduced initiation fees, some to the point that they let members in for next to nothing, just to get the monthly dues revenues.  But those kind of trunkslammer members don't have much of a track record of remaining members for more than a season or two.  Clubs are closing because it has taken eight years to come to some semblance of recovery from the $6 trillion spent on two unnecessary wars and the $7 trillion lost in the housing crash.  The middle and upper middle classes suffered the brunt of these losses.  They will have decades of distress while the 1%ers had a bad year or two.  Damage to the club industry is just one manifestation of this distress.

Agree 100% + with what J_Crisham said above.


I heard that Olympia Fields lost 50-60 members after the GFC while many "North Shore clubs" lost just 3-5....if any.

[MCirba]

Watching professionals play golf on television for millions of dollars during 4-5+ hour rounds sets a horrible example of how to play the game.

[JJShanley]

Watching professionals play golf on television for millions of dollars during 4-5+ hour rounds sets a horrible example of how to play the game.

Funnily enough, I now watch less sport than I do ever, and probably play more than I have ever.  I only watch ND football to enjoy our coach's meltdown, #firekelly, and I tend not to get up in time on Saturday or Sunday to watch my team back in Scotia, if I can find the game anywhere.


I don't tie golf on tv to golf I play, because, well, one doesn't much resemble the other.  Same with tennis, my "winter sport."  I've favorite athletes in each sport, but I don't follow them much outside of each sport's majors because I'd rather spend the time playing the game myself.

[Rob Marshall]

One of the reasons clubs in the US are failing is that membership limits are too small.  Since each member plays less than they used to, a private club should be selling more memberships at a lesser price - as they do in Australia or the UK. 


Trying to maintain "exclusivity " is something most clubs can't afford.  But the knock on effect of this is if membership rolls are bigger, we don't need as many private clubs.  More consolidation is still necessary.

Couldn't disagree more. Clubs aren't even close to full.

[BCowan]

One of the reasons clubs in the US are failing is that membership limits are too small.  Since each member plays less than they used to, a private club should be selling more memberships at a lesser price - as they do in Australia or the UK. 


Trying to maintain "exclusivity " is something most clubs can't afford.  But the knock on effect of this is if membership rolls are bigger, we don't need as many private clubs.  More consolidation is still necessary.

Couldn't disagree more. Clubs aren't even close to full.

Because their price point is too high.  Family membership model reduces the amount of potential members.  One can be a Royal Melbourne member for $4,000 a year vs $7,000-12,000 a year US model. 

[Thomas Dai]

An aside here if I may.

Historically some clubs continued to exist but occasionally changed location. For example if paid £$€ by developers for their current urban site and move elsewhere as a result. Has there been much of this over the last few decades? Kings Norton in Birmingham, UK, would be an example from a few decades ago.

In addition, many a 9-hole club has increased itself to 18-holes over time. I appreciate the discussion we've had herein many a time that 9-holes doesn't cost proportionally less to operate than 18-holes, but have any declining 18-hole (or more) clubs sold off any of their land, for say development, and used the resulting £€$ to continue existing as say a 9-holer rather than going out of existance altogether?

Just curious.

Atb

[Tim_Weiman]

Watching professionals play golf on television for millions of dollars during 4-5+ hour rounds sets a horrible example of how to play the game.

I have felt that way for quite a while now.

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