Four risks to golf's momentum

A popular Irish golfer—who has flip-flopped so many times I’m not sure where he stands now—spoke the unvarnished truth when he said he used to be opposed to the PGA Tour partnering with LIV, but looked at how much money he made last year, and, well, you know, it’s all good.

The game's ongoing success has four risks and that's one of them. We're all sick of pro golf's infatuation with money and inability to bring the top players back together. It reminds me of something Dr. Cary Middlecoff, the only dentist to win two U.S. Opens, told me about the senior tour when it was getting off the ground.

“If we play too many times,” he said, “we might remember what it is we don’t like about each other.” That might be the case with today’s stars. If they get together too often, we—meaning you and I—might remember what we don’t like about them. Four majors may be enough.

LIV has spent $5 billion so far on promoting team golf, which nobody cares about (outside the national teams of the Ryder Cup and Walker Cup). Team golf ranks up there with square drivers, bubble shafts, Feather-lite irons and the Polara golf ball as ideas whose time never came. Sorry, but team golf is even the least interesting thing about TGL, the indoor game with the best moment of the year: When Tiger Woods mistook two football fields for one football field.

If pro golf doesn’t collaborate on a compromise, the overall game risks losing its momentum. This theme became apparent to me while moderating a discussion at the annual Golf Course Superintendents Association of America conference. “Ten years ago, if you'd have told anybody that this game could grow by 50 percent, all of us would've called BS on that,” said Mike Whan, CEO of the USGA. “And if I would've said, the majority of that growth is going to come from women, juniors and people of color, then you would've thought I was smoking something. Like, no way that's gonna happen. But that's really what's happened."

The National Golf Foundation numbers pretty much agree. Total participation is up 38 percent since 2019, with women up 41 percent, kids up 48 percent and people of color up 44 percent. Last year marked the seventh straight year that on-course golfers increased with a net year-over-year gain of 1.5 million—the largest single-season jump since 2000.

Whan makes the case that the difference between now and then was that golf's leading organizations were not aligned at the height of the Tiger Boom and the numbers receded over the next two decades. In 2020, COVID caused the industry to coalesce around shared objectives, and we didn’t waste a good crisis. If golf now begins to look like the rest of society and splinters into divisiveness, we risk losing this momentum. “If we don’t figure that out,” Whan said, “we’re going to wonder what happened to this really incredible four- or five-year boom.”

The second risk to the game’s momentum is how the industry reacts to the distance rollback to be implemented by the governing bodies, the USGA and the R&A. It will hit pro golf in 2028 and recreational golf in 2030. New ball regulations will reduce driving distance 13-15 yards for tour pros and less than five yards for the rest of us, according to USGA testing. Hitting the ball farther requires an increasing plot of land for a golf course, which puts stress on affordability, labor and water usage that will ultimately lead to boycotts by golf-haters. The USGA and R&A solution doesn’t seem to make anybody happy, but I like what Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” said: “A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied.”

It’s not so funny that the PGA of America is now saying they weren’t consulted, because they put out a press release in 2023 saying the opposite: “We appreciate that the USGA and R&A ran a collaborative and patient process over the past several years. We are particularly gratified that they heard our concerns …” It wouldn’t be what I would do, and Whan says it’s not his preferred solution either, but somebody had to make the call, and the USGA and R&A have that responsibility. Given that they ran a fair and open process, the rest of us need to suck it up and get on board.

MORE: The cost of golf equipment could rise sharply amid new international tariffs

The third risk is the tariffs about to be imposed by the U.S. government on imports. As the CEO of a major equipment company told me during the Masters, “I’ve got 40 containers of components somewhere in the Pacific, coming from China to ports in Mexico, and I don’t know how much the cost of my goods will be. We could be looking at $800 drivers.” When I told this to a top retailer, he said, “Oh, no, we’re not. The consumer hit the limit at $600.” With so much of golf equipment coming from Asia—China and Vietnam in particular—there’s a lot of uncertainty in the equipment business.

The fourth risk to the game’s momentum is in sustainability. Climate crisis is out of vogue in Washington, but extreme weather events have hit golf courses hard this past year, from the hurricanes, tornadoes and floods throughout the South to the wildfires of California. “Sustainability is not a policy, but a responsibility,” Whan said. “Things are going to change a lot in Washington and in your individual state and city, but long term, you have to see this challenge. It’s one of those lights in a cave. You know it’s coming, and you’ve got to get on it now. We [golfers] are stewards of the land, relative to what else could be there.” The USGA has taken the lead with its 15-30-45 campaign: In the next 15 years, they're spending $30 million to reduce water usage on golf courses by 45 percent. "Water is the greatest risk to golf's future and it always will be," added Greg Nathan, CEO of the National Golf Foundation. Sustainability isn't popular in some quarters, and it's different from Arizona to Florida, but the game needs a cohesive strategy.

“When it comes time and you've got to call a play,” Whan said, “all of us won't like something about it, but we have to figure out how to line up and execute.” It’s called collaboration and compromise. Golf is not alone in desperately needing more of both.

Editor's Note: The original column posted and in the print magazine did not attribute the distance differentials for the proposed rollback. We used testing results provided by the USGA.