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Tiger Woods is the world’s top-earning athlete and tournaments still lure blue-chip sponsors and huge TV rights but golf is losing millions of players, prompting desperate ideas to stem the tide, writes Mark Lamport-Stokes.
In almost every part of the globe the number of players participating in the game has slumped alarmingly in the last 10 years, mainly due to the amount of time required to play a round in the high-speed digital age where attention spans appear limited.
According to the National Golf Foundation (NGF), the sport has lost five million players in the United States alone in the past decade and 20 per cent of the 25 million golfers now active in the country are likely to quit in the next few years.
Golf, though, is responding to its own warning cries of ‘Fore’ by thinking outside of the time-honoured traditions of the game that was invented in Scotland in the late 15th Century as it faces arguably its biggest struggle for survival in the 21st.
Among the innovations: soccer balls instead of a dimpled Titleist or Callaway; golf holes with a 15-inch diameter that look more like a bucket than the traditional cup; the ability for players to clock in and out of rounds and thereby pay for as long as they are on the course.
These and other measures pioneered in the US have been implemented around the world in a bid to attract people to golf who may never have considered the sport, or are simply put off by the amount of time required for 18 holes.
“There is a mindset in golf that needs to change and it’s going to take probably several years for that to happen,” said PGA of America president Ted Bishop. “For the first time ever it’s not wrong for us to look at our sport and say that there are two types of golf that can be played,” said Bishop who owns a large golf complex in Indiana.
“One is the traditional game that we watch every weekend on TV across the world and it’s the same game that many amateur golfers play day-in and day-out. But there is a whole host of other people out there that might enjoy playing more relaxed or looser forms of the sport just to see if they enjoy it. And, if they do, then ultimately the goal is to try to turn those people into customary golfers.”
Bishop, whose PGA of America organisation represents more than 27,000 professionals, has been especially excited by the possibilities raised by ‘foot golf’.
This novel concept involves a soccer ball being kicked from a set of tee markers to a green featuring a 21-inch hole. Par-three holes are between 60 and 90 yards long, par-fours range up to 150 yards and par-fives up to 250 yards.
“There are 50 million soccer players in the US compared to 25 million golfers and soccer is growing at an eight per cent rate per year so I view this as a great way to get a segment of the population on to my golf course,” Bishop said.
Pace-of-play advocate Stephen Havrilla, the new general manager of the Royal Golf Club, called on golf course designers to be more considerate to players and to take into account the limited time people have to spend on the game they love, in an interview recently with GulfWeekly.
The sport’s concern is that the under-35 age group has been tempted away by an increasing amount of alternative leisure activities, the bulk of which take less than an hour to complete whereas an 18-hole round of golf can regularly last more than four hours.
Fifteen-inch holes, which are more than three times the size of a regular cup, have already been used in a few experimental tournaments and exhibitions and this month TaylorMade-Adidas Golf will be exclusively installing super-sized holes at about 100 courses in the US as part of a pilot scheme.
Golf will also return to the Olympics at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games for the first time since 1904 and its inclusion there has boosted state funding for the sport in many countries where it is in its infancy.
Encouragingly, the global trend of dwindling numbers in the sport is being bucked in several parts of Asia with countries like China, Japan, South Korea and India enjoying a surge in participation.
