The Daily Telegraph reported on March 29, 2009, that clubs are being driven out of business as the ‘credit crunch’ forces tens of thousands of golfers to ditch expensive membership fees.
Wrong.
About half the country's 2,500 clubs have lost members in the last year, but not because golfers can’t afford fees.
For better or for worse, the golf landscape has changed in the last 10 years while the private members clubs remains wretchedly tethered to 18th Century values.
Paying members will no longer suffer archiac rules made by executive dinosaurs who think ‘Twitter’ is street slang for a gay text messaging service.
These are men who believe maintaining control of 180 acres of fairways and greens means keeping a white knuckle grip on everything associated with tradition and rejecting all that involves change: equality of the sexes, mobile communications, shorts and sandals without socks, and wedding-party guests who insist their Paul Smith shirts should be worn outside of trousers on a Saturday night.
The problem is too many private golf clubs remain an anathema to family life. They are the fiefdom of fat, aged men on big pensions looking for a hobby while they’re not babysitting the grandchildren.
These men of privilege cherish their new power base because the ol’ lady has started answering back more than she used to. For decades the dinosaurs operated in corporate boardrooms doing as little as possible while the missus got on with the hard labour.
They cultivated a smooth talking combo, at work and home, that amounted to stating the obvious, bull' and lies. Apart from training their tongues, survival relied on the status quo.
With few ideas of their own, the life was squeezed from the ideas of those around them. The same formula was adopted when they joined the elite members of the golf clubs' inner circles in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Golf was at the height of its success and queues for membership were long. In the UK, thousands of players were signed up by a proposer, but most applicants waited years for an interview with the dinosaurs just to get a mid week card.
It wasn't long before others saw an opportunity and new courses were built to cope with the demand. This meant fewer players to go around, and while the corporate-owned courses launched innovative marketing campaigns to promote their plush leisure golf complexes, the dinsosuars remained oblivious.
Innovation for them meant installing bird boxes, investing in the latest Taylor Made driver and banning new members from tucking their trousers in their socks to avoid muddy turn-ups on soggy Saturday mornings. As newer, corporate centres sprung up disenchanted golfers soon began to leave the older clubs as member waiting lists reduced to zero, course quality deteriorated and fees began to climb.
Housing developments are expected on many of the UK's oldest courses over the next 20 years. Most of them still can't see it coming. Nineteen clubs have already gone into administration since the start of 2009, according The English Golf Union.
But there is at last hope of a revival thanks to a remedy. Healing the terminal problem affecting the relationship between golf and home life.
In America - where most experts believe family demands are seeing golfers leave the game - the total number of people who play has fallen from 30 million to 26 million since 2000.
A solution was first drafted in Sweden and now the US and UK have adopted similar measures.
The EGU, ELGA, PGA and Golf Foundation have established the England Golf Partnership to focus purely on golf development with the aim of making England 'the Leading Golf Nation in the World' by 2020. A full copy of the plan can be viewed here.
Some of the more forward looking clubs have begun to introduce measures of their own, forging links with commercial leisure centres to attract members, developing their youth academies and recruiting more social members.
Me? I just love to play, watch Hogan and then play some more. In case anyone else thinks Hogan was onto something, the videos to the left described some of his routines and thoughts.
This site is dedicated to promoting golf in the UK and a mutual appreciation of the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment