Today's Golf is Dying thumbsucker comes courtesy of Market Watch, and it's a damned fine piece of work. Let the defenestration begin...
We shouldn’t be saying this a few days after the Masters, but we will anyway: Golf isn’t helping itself.
It isn’t the Professional Golfers’ Association’s fault that world No. 1 Dustin Johnson fell down some stairs and couldn’t play in the biggest major tournament in the U.S., but it certainly wasn’t doing much to help ratings, which faltered in the early rounds. Even when players are healthy and the rounds are as dramatic as they were at the end of last year’s tournament, Masters ratings still manage to slip. Golf’s answer is to change absolutely nothing and trudge onward.
Yes, it is damning that those involved in a game whose history is measured in centuries have confidence in the appeal of their game... How dare they? When you've lost Market Watch, you've lost the country....
But wait, the accusations are flying....
It is very much the Ladies Professional Golf Association’s fault that it allowed a tattletale television viewer to call in and add four strokes to Lexi Thompson’s total at the ANA Inspiration tournament after she spotted a ball less than an inch from its original position. Those strokes cost Thompson the tournament and not only incurred the wrath of Tiger Woods but of just about every golfer at Augusta National in the first weekend of April.Though both the United States Golf Association and Britain’s Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews have agreed to sweeping rules changes that would eliminate such pedantic penalties by 2019, they’re more than happy to let Thompson’s loss stand and continue their draconian approach to the game for another year and a half.
Less than an inch? The wrath of Tiger Woods! Wow, this seems criminal, though who wants to volunteer to share with the author Tiger's rather tortured history with the rules of the game he plays? And that bad drop at the 14th at Sawgrass? Way more than an inch involved...
But the thing is, when you're writing a piece like this, it's helpful if you get the facts correct... The new rules have not been agreed to, they're in the comment period.... It's also unclear, at least to this writer, whether they would have avoided Lexigate, but they are clearly trying.
But note the quality of the argument.... We go from "Changing absolutely nothing" to pending rules changes to address Count No. 1 in his indictment... No agenda here.
No doubt you anticipate what comes next... Yup, women and minorities hardest hit:
In the United States, golf doesn’t have the luxury of time. In 2014, Nielsen noted that 63% of the PGA’s television audience was over the age of 55. Some 87% of that audience was white, while only 12% was younger than 35. By comparison, only 25% of the National Basketball Association’s audience is 55 or older, 47% is younger than 35, and 57% is nonwhite.
The LPGA’s key demographic isn’t all that different from that of its male counterparts. Both the PGA and LPGA have a viewership that’s about 63% male. Roughly 64% of the LPGA’s audience is 30 or older, and 84% is white.
So, sports demographics skew male... Alert the media. Oh, right... And by all means the NBA is just the perfect comparison point, no? No agenda there....
But you know what might have been helpful and insightful? Is the audience any older or whiter than it's been in years gone by?
And yes, we go on in this mode for a while:
Golf’s core audience is literally dying, and it’s affecting golf far beyond its television broadcasts. After the U.S. built golf courses at a rate of roughly 400 a year during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s retreated from a peak of 16,000 courses. Though the U.S. still accounts for more than 40% of the world’s golf courses, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF), the country has lost nearly 800 courses in the past decade. Some have been outright abandoned for their real estate value.
Of course, it would help if anybody actually wanted to play the game. The NGF says the number of U.S. players dropped from an all-time high of 30 million in 2005 to 24.1 million in 2015. That’s below even the pre-Tiger Woods high of 24.7 in 1995. Though optimists note that the average number of rounds being played per player hasn’t dropped, the U.S. golf industry has been largely unable to woo beginners into playing more than a few rounds before dropping the sport entirely.
Look, math is hard, but apparently logic is even harder. Yes, we created a series of insane incentives that got abused, and too many golf course were built to sell real estate.... But if the core audience for golf were, literally, dying, how do the average rounds per player stay constant? Obviously, as we've noted before, those six million golfers that disappeared were once-a-year players, which doesn't have much of a revenue impact.
OK, viewer warning, more scary statistics ahead:
Nike NKE, -0.46% has stopped producing golf equipment, Dick’s Sporting GoodsDKS, +0.72% is cutting sales-floor space dedicated to the sport and business is moving off the golf course. Even worse, the number of people ages 18 to 30 playing the sport is down 35% in the past decade. It’s an expensive sport that takes more than three hours to play, and instead of making it more attractive to newcomers, designers have been hell-bent on making courses as difficult as possible.
Listen, we understand this is an era of niches and that golf doesn’t have to try to be all things to all people. But golf isn’t e-sports. It isn’t soccer. It isn’t the NBA. It’s a sport whose niche is narrowing and whose player base is dwindling. It also sits on acres of real estate that have become increasingly valuable as expanding cities consider the redevelopment of golf courses into industrial sites, agricultural areas, housing, park land and mixed-use developments.
OK, that 35% number jumps out, but with no citation I'm going to assume that it has the same kind of bias as the NGF number above. It's probably more significant, because of the age bracket, but one also might speculate that 35% more of that age group reside in their parents' basement...
But the author, while acutely aware of the inevitability of death, seems curiously unaware of the equally inevitable ageing process.... Cheer up, man, there's always going to be old people. I mean until we get a single-payer health care system, that is....
But it's his rousing coda that's the piece de resistance:
There is no second coming of Tiger Woods. There is no burgeoning generation of children longing to play a four-hour game filled with nitpicky, self-policing rules. There is no city in the U.S. willing to trade density and tax ratables for divots and rough. If golf has little to offer this country but televised shots of manicured greens and galleries and living rooms of cranky, aging diehards, then it should prepare to take a seat beside horse racing among U.S. sports antiques.
This guy is so caught up in his narrative, that he doesn't understand the extent to which he missed what should have been his lede. Why is the fact that there's no resurrection important, when the first coming of Tiger Woods didn't create any golfers.... Which is actually good news, given where we currently stand on that front.
There's little doubt that the current kiddies, those we label with the M-word, are a bit of a challenge for our game. That's partially due to their economic circumstances, but also due to some defining characteristics that Geoff gets into in his post on this article. But most of what I've seen recently, data points like rounds played and ball sales, point to a very stable environment.
More importantly, golf continues to draw in its share of athletes from other sports, and I know many millennials that are totally hooked on the game. And once hooked, it often evolves into a lifetime passion... As Geoff notes, the game can do better at adapting, which it has done for centuries. I don't find that a top-down approach proves all that effective, witness Hack Golf and Foot Golf and the like...
But it also seems to me that there's something else at play in these kinds of pieces, the author seems almost offended that golf exists in its current form. That we who love the game can't see it as it appears to him, rather than the effort required to see it as we do.... But we're not going away and we're not all dying off, but no need to go to the effort of formulating a coherent argument...
Wanna bet which way he voted in November?
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