R.I.P. Golf - Volume XXVIII

We've seen every flavor of the R.I.P. Golf meme, but what's most curious is that Shackelford liked this thumb-sucker from Karl Taro Greenfeld at Men's Journal... Here's Geoff's take on it:

Unlike many of the recent golf-is-dead stories, Taro Greenfeld likes the game and has a daughter who is intrigued, but the time and difficulty issue is at the core of his examination, and he gives plenty of time to the development model of the 80s and 90s which left us with no shortage of bad, long, unsatisfying courses.

OK, that's fair enough, and this is the excerpt in Geoff's post:

Lake Las Vegas could be the poster development for an entire era of American excess — 

the real estate boom, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the exuberant overinvestment in golf courses as bait to sell property. The 3,600-acre community built around a 320-acre artificial lake in Henderson, Nevada, featured two Jack Nicklaus–designed golf courses and one Tom Weiskopf course, the primary selling points for homes ranging from $500,000 to $5 million. Ritz-­Carlton opened a resort on the lake, which was declared a "Hot Spot" in 2004 by the Washington Post.

One of those three golf courses has since closed, the Ritz-Carlton is long gone (it's now a Hilton), and some of the luxury houses have hit the market for as little as $150,000. The golf course has been converted to scrubby trails, and it turns out that homes on a desert are a lot less desirable than homes on a golf course. "For so many years, golf was a tool for developers to sell property," says Phil Smith, a golf course designer who worked with Nicklaus and Weiskopf during the boom. "There wasn't a sense of long-term viability in some of these developments."

Ummmm...seems to me this is less the dreary 80's and 90's than the late aughts that led to the 2008 real estate meltdown.  Yes, they built too many golf courses in Las Vegas, but then again they were building too much of everything.

The author attributes much of this distress to the demise of Tiger, which he attributes to him "triple-bogeying his marriage"... cute phraseology, but the case that Tiger drove an increase in anything but TV ratings is really thin.  here's the gloom and doom 'graph:

By any measure, participation in the game is way off, from a high of 30.6 million golfers in 2003 to 24.7 million in 2014, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). The long-term trends are also troubling, with the number of golfers ages 18 to 34 showing a 30 percent decline over the last 20 years. Nearly every metric — TV ratings, rounds played, golf-equipment sales, golf courses constructed — shows a drop-off. "I look forward to a time when we've got the wind at our back, but that's not what we're expecting," says Oliver "Chip" Brewer, president and CEO of Callaway. "This is a demographic challenge."

Somehow, he doesn't figure this data point into his analysis:

Overall sales of golf balls in April at on- and off-course shops were up 4.9 percent in units and nearly 10.9 percent in dollars, compared to April 2014. According to Golf Datatech, it was the best April for golf ball sales in terms of dollars (just over $48.5 million) since the research firm began publishing monthly sales figures in 1997.

Look, you can find data points to support any premise, but rounds played are essentially flat and those "lost golfers" cited above tend to be folks that played about two rounds a year...

I do agree with Geoff that the best part of this piece is the author discussing his daughter's and his own struggles with the game, which are oh-so-real.  He throws the usual bone to foot golf and Frisbee golf, and I'd propose to stipulate that anything that doesn't involve a golf club in a human's hand is not going to grow our game....

Which brings us to TopGolf...  <sigh>:

Nearly everyone I spoke with at the convention pointed to one company as the potential savior. "Maybe Topgolf is our Tiger," says Callaway's Brewer, which owns just under 20 percent of Topgolf, the company that has devised a simulated version of the game by putting microchips into balls at high-tech driving ranges. Players hit into the target area as a computer screen keeps score based on how accurate the shots are. In between drinking, eating, and listening to the house DJs, they stand on an Astroturf mat and play 20 balls. It's golf's version of bowling. The company was formed in the U.K. but was acquired by a U.S. investment group in 2005. Topgolf has 13 locations in the U.S., and will have 20 by the end of the year and as many as 50 by the end of 2017, including a 105,000-square-foot facility adjacent to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It's golf as karaoke, with crowds of young people sitting in hitting bays and partying between taking their hacks. And the company is booming, with revenue far exceeding $100 million this year. Most important for the golf industry, 54 percent of its 4 million visitors last year were between the ages of 18 and 34.

Savior?  Color me skeptical.... golf is dying because of five-hour rounds, but it's going to be saved by a place where there's a four-hour wait to get to a hitting bay?  Good luck with that...

I've no ax to grind here, and per our agreed-to stipulation above, actual golf clubs are in the hands of human beings, so we've got that going for us.  But get this from the TopGolf TopGuy:

"We're not in the golf business, or, OK, we are, but we're really in the hospitality business," says Ken May, 54, the Topgolf CEO. He was the chief executive who presided over the merger of FedEx and Kinko's and joined Topgolf in 2013.

OK, so we're going to be saved by a guy who's not in the golf business....Now there's just too much in here to have fun with, so forgive me for going long... see what you think of this:

I went back to my hitting bay, waved my 5-iron in front of a sensor, and a microchipped ball already tagged with my name for scoring purposes came rolling down the ramp. I was hitting 'em OK, fading a little but making 200 or so yards, scoring 75 after 20 balls. (I have no idea if that's a good score or not.) At one point a guy in khaki pants interrupted me during my backswing to tell me I was picking at the ball instead of scooping. Jeff Johnston was a PGA professional who offered a half-dozen little tweaks and pointers for my swing — unwanted advice, in other words, after which my game completely fell apart, just like it would have on a real course.

OK, I'll give you second to stop laughing about the guy "making 200 yards" with his faded 5-iron... but our game is to be saved by a PGA pro telling a novice to scoop his 5-iron... what could go wrong?

The there's this gem:

A week after the golf show, my daughter, Esmee, and I drove to a local course to cash in one of my vouchers. Esmee hadn't had a great season on her team, becoming progressively demoralized as the season went on. I understood why: Golf is a difficult, humbling game. Our nine-hole round that afternoon was the classic good walk spoiled: lovely sun, cooling breeze, shimmering eucalyptus trees, and poorly hit balls zigzagging back and forth across the fairway.

On the seventh hole, a straight par 4 up a little hill and then an elbow to the right, Esmee botched her 2-iron off the tee, sending the ball skittering up the fairway. But her second shot, a 3-iron from the rough just left of the fairway, was magnificent, her swing a rightward path from three till nine that followed through, the contact a satisfying thwack, and the ball soaring some 200 yards, coming to rest just shy of the green. She stood for a moment watching it, and then she looked at me and smiled.

Letting your 15-year old daughter learn the game with a 2-iron in the 21st century is de facto child abuse...where are the child welfare agencies when you need them?

Folks, we've laughed, we've cried and we've made fun of folks, satisfying all the key tenets of our mission statement.  We play a niche sport that is not dying, but has no shortage of challenges... we need to put more Esmees into the situation described above, out on a beautiful day with her patient (if measurement-challenged father) to experience that feeling of a purely-struck golf shot.  That, not Foot-Golf or TopGolf, is what will bring her back.