By John Hawkins
Photo: J.D. Cuban
June 15, 2007
No sport is more loyal to its roots than golf. Advances in equipment technology are viewed as a threat to the game's skill requirement, heedlessly compromising shot values on courses designed a century ago. Saddle shoes still sell, Arnold Palmer will always rule, and for all the cash thrown at today's tour pros, the prize they covet most is a 90-decibel green jacket awarded at a tournament where you can smoke in the clubhouse and buy a pimento-cheese sandwich for $1.50.
Golf's competitive law throughout most of the world is determined by a governing body called the Royal & Ancient. Despite short-sleeve mock necks and hand-held distance devices that provide an exact yardage to the pin, smallball definitely is old school. Its anachronistic sensibilities never gelled with the progressive culture at ESPN, which ended its relationship with the PGA Tour last year, although viewer ratings among all tour carriers have been in decline for several years.
Recreationally, golf has experienced little or no statistical growth since a popularity spike in the early 1990s. Tiger Woods remains the tour's only black player, which is one more than you'll find on the LPGA Tour. For all the recent efforts made to expand, diversify, modernize and revolutionize the game, the leopard still has its spots. Golf is hard. Golf is expensive. A full round requires four (or more) hours and a hundred acres of grass. A Sunday afternoon telecast surely leaves many people thinking golf is exceedingly slow, patently boring and full of middle-aged white guys with a lot more money than personality.
None of this stagnancy keeps me awake at night, nor should it bother you in the slightest. Long live golf in the shadows of America's sporting mainstream, as a niche with understated panache and antiquated character. An acquired taste with addictive traits, it counts several million avid participants and hardcore fans, some of whom have made it a lifestyle, but this business of growing the game? It's a fishy proposition, a sucker pin fronted by a hazard.
| "We talk in honorable tones, then scream bloody murder when a starter sends us out behind four choppers." | ||
Golf wasn't meant for the masses. Corporate-friendly by nature, it's damn near childproof at most levels, plagued by access issues, pace-of-play predicaments and cost. The high-end, daily-fee boom may be over, but I don't see a bunch of low-budget, six-hole municipal facilities sprouting up in big cities, either. Any well-intentioned attempts to broaden the game's so-called boundaries--The First Tee program is a perfect example--should be motivated by moral obligation, not commercial success. If you're an entrepreneur, you'd call that a waste of land and money.
You can swear it ain't so, but our game has exclusionary reflexes. We talk in honorable tones, then scream bloody murder when a starter sends us out behind four choppers, all armed with double-bogey handicaps and graphite-shafted ball retrievers. When does it become OK to admit we don't need any more beginners? We try to educate kids willing to work as caddies, but golf's rules are three steps beyond complex, the particulars of its etiquette immense. The point of diminished returns can arrive very quickly.
Of course, one man's game is another man's business. Without growth, you're standing still, and if you're standing still in a public sector, some guy in a striped tie won't be getting his obese year-end bonus. You can't rightfully begrudge a man for driving profit margins--the dude wants to retire early so he can, ahem, go play golf--but the organizations that want most to grow golf have an obvious financial stake in their message. The PGA of America on a recreational level, the PGA Tour in terms of spectators and TV viewers--both operations regularly compromise the game's essence and integrity to generate additional revenue for themselves.
In November 2000, tour commissioner Tim Finchem's opening remarks at the inaugural Golf 20/20 summit included this statement: "We should consider as our first goal to become [America's] No. 1 sport in fan base, surpassing the NFL by the year 2020 and reaching 177 million fans." What sounded far-fetched 6½ years ago sounds preposterous now--did a man of Finchem's intellect and composure really issue such a challenge? More than the crummy research data, however, is the underlying, covertly poisonous suggestion that golf is "failing" if it isn't getting bigger.
In the spring of 2007, pro golf's problems and nagging concerns are defined largely in the backfire of the growth-is-great myth. For instance, was the tour's long-term alliance with Golf Channel, whose viewership numbers are outrageously low, an admission of defeat? It makes no difference what some half-informed media analyst tells you--losing ESPN was a massive blow to a league looking to expand its audience beyond its given parameters. Think of it this way: Would any commissioner with designs on becoming more popular than the NFL do what Finchem did?
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