Selfies on the green? Stuffy golf clubs need to get with the times

Golf clubs across the world have been warned the sport could fall into crisis unless they lighten up a little, relax strict dress codes and withdraw bans on tweeting, snapchatting and booze on the fairway.

Golf was first first played in 15th-century Scotland and isn’t known for keeping pace with changes in wider society, especially admitting women. But experts say it has to act now to embrace millennials.

Consultants hired by the sport’s various governing bodies say golf clubs’ stuffy attitudes as well as the high cost of game (on wallets and time) have contributed to as many as 10 million fewer players globally since before the financial crisis.

Steve Mona, chief executive of the Florida-based World Golf Foundation, said clubs must adapt to the demands of younger people to ensure the sport has a future, even as decisions by Nike and Adidas to pull out of golf equipment raised fears about the sport’s viability.

“The headlines ‘golf in crisis’ are overblown,” Mona said. “We have a healthy number of core golfers. But we do need to attract new and younger players. Each year about 500,000 leave the game because of death or the physical inability to play, and so every year we have to replace them.”

Backward cap

Mona said clubs look at if their rules need to be as strict as they often are. “Can you go out on the golf course with your shirt untucked? Can you wear your cap backwards? Can you play music in your cart? Can you bring your mobile devices out there? Can you drink beer while you’re going round?

“Millennials are used to being able to do all those things in their recreation,” he said. “We need to make it the same for golf.”

Mona (59) says traditionalists may prickle at the thought of selfies and beers on the green.

“But clubs have to have something to please young people,” he said. “It’s a tricky problem. Someone like me wouldn’t think of engaging in social media on the course; I’d only be thinking of the next shot. But young people want to be on Facebook and Instagram between shots.”

He warned those clubs that refuse to relax their rules and put all their chips in with baby boomers: “I’m telling you, in eight to 10 years when they start ageing out, you’re going to be in trouble.”

Golf has dramatically declined in popularity since the financial crisis. The number of players in the US, the world’s biggest golf market, have fallen from 30 million in 2008 to 25 million today, according to research firm Golf Datatech. The global golf equipment industry is still worth $8.6 billion.

Numbers declined by 2.2 per cent in England and 0.8 per cent in Scotland last year, according to KPMG. In Japan, numbers are down by 40 per cent since a peak in the 1990s.

At the same time, the game has experienced sustained growth in South America, China and, most significantly, Vietnam. The latter is undergoing a course-building boom to more than double the number of courses to 96 within five years.

Rio interest

Experts hope that golf’s inclusion in the Rio Olympics – for the first time since 1904 – will spark renewed interest. The challenge is to convert that interest into participation. They note that the enthusiasm generated by the likes of Tiger Woods tended to stay rooted to the sofa.

“Tiger Woods didn’t influence people to take up golf. He got more people to watch it on television, but they didn’t go out and play,” said Tom Stine of Golf Datatech. “He drew kids’ attention to the game because they wanted to be like Tiger, just like they do watching LeBron James or Lionel Messi.”

But while you can play basketball or soccer in a playground, you can only play at being Tiger with a lot of imagination.

Both Stine and Mona said the US game is only part of the way through a major reduction of the number of courses to reflect the number of regular players rather than real estate developers’ imaginations.

Mona, who plays off a handicap of nine, reckons there will be a continued contraction, with hundreds of courses closing a year.

Courses tanked

“There’s way too many of them,” he said. “In the boom years, real estate entrepreneurs thought they’d build courses and people would flock to them. But when the market tanked, so did golf courses.”

“It was crazy,” said Stine (66). “During the real estate boom, people were building courses everywhere. They didn’t build golf courses because the town needed a golf course, they were building houses around them because they could get more money for the homes. There were courses literally across the street from each other.

“But then the real estate bubble burst, lots of people lost their jobs, lost their houses, and the clubs didn’t have enough members left.” Guardian Service