SAVING PAR

Austin Price Monday, August 11, 2014 Comments Off on SAVING PAR
SAVING PAR

Doomsday forecasting is one of the great human pastimes. Whether it be old folks grousing about how the obvious immorality and stupidity of youth culture — with particular emphasis on baggy pants and loud music — signals the final decline of societal standards, angry youth complaining about how their peers’ idiocy means we’re two generations from a world run by morons, or the much more literal predictions that come out of the mouth of street-corner evangelists, everyone and their mother seems to find a world at the brink.

This is true even of isolated world. Novelists and literary critics bemoan the state of literacy and writing; more than a few classical musicians I know think that dubstep is the lowest point on music’s evolutionary ladder; and sports fans — sports fans are a breed of their own.

Golfers, in particular, are in a bit of a state right now, though perhaps rightly so. According to Derek Smith, a professional golfer and the general manager of Mallard Cove, golf courses have been disappearing at an alarming rate, anywhere between 100 and 150 a year. Even though this decline hasn’t signaled an end to golf course construction — he also says that at least 50 new courses are constructed nationwide every year — it does signal an overall net loss of roughly 50 courses per year, and a massive departure from the glory days of the 90s and early 2000s, when over 400 new courses were constructed per year.

“Golf courses never get cheaper to keep open,” Smith warned me, “and it’s not just about keeping up the number of players. Maintenance gets more expensive every year; the cost of maintenance has doubled if not tripled in the last ten years.”

His is not a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, either; according to the National Golf Foundation, more than 640 golf courses have vanished since 2005, a more significant loss than even Smith had estimated. Likewise, the National Golf Foundation estimates that roughly one percent of all players up and quit each year, cutting off revenue to courses that are exceptionally expensive to maintain, even in better economic conditions.

The Southwest Louisiana area has seen its own share of recent closures, with Pine Shadows shuttering its doors in February. Much of the difficulty comes in attracting golfers, whom Ronald Rider, the former owner of Pine Shadows, calls a “rare breed.”

“You can’t just make players walk through the door,” Rider says, noting that even competitive prices and nationally ranked greens aren’t always enough incentive. Many seem to have a stigma about local courses for whatever reason, preferring to pay exorbitant prices for even mediocre golf courses so long as they have a good reputation and are located elsewhere, rather than pay completely reasonable prices for local courses, even if those courses have been recognized with awards and honors.

Smith raises similar concerns, noting that “you feel like you can’t raise any prices, because then the players will start to make threats about leaving,” and departing players are something that courses quite literally cannot afford at this time.

But rising prices don’t actually seem to pose that big of a problem to the average golfer. For one, local golf courses are very, very flexible and charitable when it comes to making the game affordable. Mallard Cove offers a number of “twilight rates” — decreased rates that correspond to later, less popular tee times — and long-term memberships that defray costs, as does the National Golf Club of Louisiana. Mallard Cove also has some of the most competitively priced memberships and playing fees around.

Another reason that rising problems don’t deter golfers is that most professionals seem to think that people are willing to play the game no matter what. When asked if money was any real obstacle to players joining the game or playing it, Rider quickly disabused any such suggestion.

“People don’t mind spending money to play,” he said. “We used to joke that the diehards would play golf even if they were on unemployment!”

Smith echoes Rider on this, going so far as to suggest that the National Golf Foundation’s figures are wrong. “That one-percent figure isn’t right,” he says. “We may be losing casual golfers, but we’re not losing the core golfers. They’re going to play no matter what.”

derek smith

Gerry Pockat, the manager of the Louisiana National Golf Club, disagrees. “People don’t have to golf,” he contends, noting that the first things cut from a tightening family budget are the luxuries.

Pockat, Rider and Smith all agree that one of the main reasons for a drop-off in the number of players is a changing cultural climate, and a dearth of time available to people in this mile-a-minute world. “The only issue,” claims Pockat, “is time.”

Smith is quick to note that even core players are playing less, simply because it’s hard to find the time to play at all, while Rider foresees that this will lead to an even greater decline in the number of players. And this isn’t just a local problem: The PGA and the U.S. Golf Association have seen the writing on the wall, and have decided that, at an average of four hours per game, the current system of golf just isn’t feasible. Hence these organizations have developed the “Time for Nine” initiative, introduced in 2013. The idea is that instead of playing through all 18 holes, players can limit themselves to the first 9, making a somewhat brisk affair out of a sport infamous for its long playtime.

Though it may not solve the problem entirely — two hours is still a substantial temporal investment — it does make the game somewhat more manageable. The Time for Nine idea has had enough of an effect that Pockat has had the National Golf Club of Louisiana adopt a similar initiative.

None of this is a permanent solution, though, and golf course managers know that they can only keep going for so long by focusing on keeping their traditional players interested. One way or another, golf has to find a way to grow and incorporate more players, a task that is not exactly easy, given a plethora of cultural stigmas and a host of competing entertainment options that make golf seem like something out of the stone-age by comparison.

Like it or not, the sport has traditionally been known as the realm of rich, older white men who have more time than they know what to do with. To many, it has all of the cultural appeal of watching paint dry, especially when compared to the international appeal of soccer, the blistering energy of basketball, and the barely-contained aggression and high-impact feel of football (which is to say nothing of video games, which are immediately gratifying and accessible in a way that golf simply is not).

RONrider

The fact of the matter is, if golf isn’t made more appealing — and made more appealing to children — there’s very little future for the game. This fact has not gone unnoticed. While there are a number of national initiatives meant to promote golf among youth, prominent among them The First Tee program and Tiger Woods’ own Tiger Woods Foundation, there are also a number of local systems in place to introduce the game to kids and teens in a way that makes the sport seem not only accessible but fun.

“Youngsters are where you get your numbers,” advises Bear Suarez, golf pro in residence at the National Golf Club of Louisiana and the owner of the Bear Suarez Junior Golf Academy, an organization which, as the name suggests, works mostly with children to get them interested in the game of golf. The problem, Suarez says, is that most people don’t introduce the game correctly; either parents force their children into camps that they simply aren’t interested in, kids are forced to follow their parents around the course as essentially tag-alongs, or kids are introduced to the game after they’ve gotten used to finding most of their entertainment inside in the form of digital pleasures. “Golf is for everybody,” Suarez says. “I’d like to expose every kid to golf if I could.”

To that end, Suarez’s academy and the National Golf Club of Louisiana have established a number of summer camps and clinics, as well as a number of programs that specifically reach out to middle-school students. Not to be outdone, Smith and Mallard Cove have reached out to the youth of the area in their own way, with five distinct programs, including the SNAG program — which reaches out to church groups in the inner-city, targeting young children by introducing them to the basics   of the game, summer camps, a youth league and a number of tournament teams, each of which targets different age and skill groups.

For Smith, the goal is “to expose every kid in our community to golf, and see if they like it.” The response, he says, has been uniformly positive, especially, he notes, amongst girls.

In fact, despite acknowledging that “the (number of) rounds [played per year] are down, that’s a matter of fact — Smith is adamant that golf is back on the rise.

“This is our best year since 2009,” Smith boasts. And Smith projects nothing but a positive future for Mallard Cove (though he was quick to warn that he’s not been carried away by the hypothetical economic boom that has everyone proclaiming SWLA something of a new Houston).

Pockat had similar feelings, noting that, despite the gloom and doom forecasted by many, “the growth forecast is very good,” and that “our rounds have been up 10 percent this year.”

Ron Rider, though, contends that their hope is a matter of their unique position; unlike Pine Shadows, which was privately owned and so had nothing to depend on but its own income. Mallard Cove and the National Golf Club of Louisiana are both municipal courses, which means they receive more than a little financial assistance from their respective cities, in addition to whatever profit they manage to turn on their own.

It is a state of affairs Rider believes cannot last. After all, despite the most optimistic of projections, there’s no denying that the number of rounds played per year has drastically decreased. Rider, who’s worked in golf course management since the 70s, remembers a time when courses showed anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 rounds played per average year, compared to today, when even the best years, Rider says, courses show only about 20,000 rounds per year.

If, as Rider contends, these city courses are destined to lose their funding (“What happens when people realize all that money is being spent on a sport few people play, huh?‚” says Rider.), there seems little security when it comes to the future of  golf.

bearsuarez

“I doubt there’ll be a resurgence,” Rider says, his disappointment evident. Even Pockat, Smith and Suarez, for all of their hope, could not hide a similar disappointment when asked about the future of the game, each of them remarking that, no matter how optimistic they were.

The sad fact is that they may have every reason to be concerned. Their concerns — that golfing is too time-consuming; that it has a hard time competing against other, more immediately satisfying hobbies; that it has a very exclusive image — are not unfounded, and golf is seeing a dip in popularity not only nationally but internationally. From 2006 to 2013, over 120,000 registered English golfers quit playing (keep in mind that English golfers constitute 29 percent of Europe’s total golfing market).

It’s not that steps aren’t being taken to make the game more accessible — as mentioned, there are a number of programs being offered to young people to engage their interest and make the game more attractive, and there are a number of design changes being instituted to make the game run quicker — but the problem is that golf is an inherently foreboding game, both in terms of image and in investment. Even Rory McIlroy, the latest golf prodigy, admitted in a press conference at the Augusta National club this year that the game was in desperate need of radical reinvention.

The question is: Just what is that radical reinvention going to look like? Change the game too much, and it’s not going to be golf anymore. Those who’ve suggested drastically altering the length of courses, eliminating hazards and alternate terrain, and greatly increasing the size of the hole are designing a game that is not quite golf. Those who suggest the future is in hooking people with golfing simulators and then moving them out onto the course fail to realize that there’s a world of difference between hiking an 18-hole course in the middle of summer — and paying gobs of money for the privilege, and lounging in an air-conditioned room.

It’s hard to imagine making the game more dynamic or increasing the pace, since the deliberate and reserved pace of the game is directly linked to how it is played, and it’s difficult to see how golf can be made more accessible when, unlike every other sport, it is not so easy to pick up and play. A group of kids have no trouble getting together at a local basketball court — whether in a park or somebody’s driveway — or cobbling together a rough soccer, football or baseball game due to the naturally simple composition of such games, and the flexible space constrain. But golf, a game which largely revolves around navigating the course, is inestimably more difficult.

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