Back in 2004, I helped to launch a new magazine, Golf Punk, to an unsuspecting and, on the face of it, largely apathetic public.
It was billed as the “golf magazine for the rest of us,” and we, like the editorial team, figured there must be legions of frustrated amateur golfers out there who felt either abandoned or alienated by the existing crop of golf titles, all of which seemed to be so obsessed with swing mechanics that they were slowly sucking all of the joy out of the game.
For a while, Golf Punk reinvigorated a market (and a game) that badly needed shaking up. Inevitably, the first cover featured Tiger Woods.
Here was one of the greatest players the game had ever witnessed, a young man — a young black man — who appeared to be dragging golf kicking and screaming if not into the 21st century, then at least somewhere into the late 1970s.
Tiger was a phenomenon, a prodigiously talented player who seemed to be playing a different game than every other pro golfer out there, rewriting the record books each and every week, winning scores of tournaments and, as a marketing man’s dream, fast on his way to becoming the sport’s first billionaire.
Of course, all that changed on the evening of Nov. 27, 2009, when Woods wrapped his Cadillac Escalade around a fire hydrant and his career imploded spectacularly in a maelstrom of infidelity, injuries, sex addiction, divorce and sponsors running for the hills.
Golf had a chance when it still had Woods. Without him, it’s struggling.
Superficially all seems well, at least in the professional game, where the prize money on the PGA Tour continues to rise to obscene levels ($10 million for the winner of the FedEx Cup being the most eye-popping example), but its appeal to the younger generations, beyond the elite pro ranks, is dwindling faster than Tiger’s chances of ever winning again.
Even high-profile manufacturers are beginning to rethink their presence in the sport. Recently Nike announced they would no longer be making golf clubs, balls and bags to concentrate purely on golf footwear and clothing. Adidas, meanwhile, also seems to have lost the appetite to make it work in golf, seeking to offload their TaylorMade and Adams equipment brands amid plummeting sales.
It’s a sure sign that golf is heading in the wrong direction. And, as with so many other issues, it’s the millennials’ fault. Facing financial and time constraints, they’re finding other ways to spend their time and money, and the net result is that golf is suffering. Really suffering.
The key question, I guess, is whether golf really suits modern-day life.
Put simply, golf is not easy, and if it’s not easy, it’s not fun. So why bother?
And for Generation Y, at least, the answer is no. According to the National Golf Foundation, there are an estimated 24.1 million golfers in the United States, down from 24.7 million in the previous two years and over 5 million fewer than played the game in 2005. In 2013, for example, golf in the United States lost over 400,000 players, half of whom were millennials.
But can you blame them for turning their backs on golf? This, after all, remains a game where clubs can reject membership applications based on gender and where the rulebook is about as impenetrable as Kevlar.
It’s a game where the wrong shoes, shirt or trousers can see you thrown off a golf course and a game where it really does take time, money, dedication and endless practice to become anywhere approaching competent.
Put simply, it’s not easy, and if it’s not easy, it’s not fun.
And if it’s not fun? Well, why bother?
In the next week or so, you’ll see golf re-enter the Olympic Games as it is included in the roster for the first time in 112 years. It should be a seismic moment for the sport, a much-needed marketing opportunity to show the watching world just what the game has to offer, but when the top four ranked players — Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Rory McIlroy — have already decided to skip the event, for a variety of reasons, there’s every chance that golf won’t be in the Games in Tokyo in four years’ time.
McIlroy, in particular, has been very open, perhaps too open, about his reasons for not playing in Brazil, insisting he got into the game to win tournaments and not to be any kind of ambassador. He’s even admitted he won’t watch the golf at the Olympics, preferring to check out the “track and field, swimming, diving, the stuff that matters.” I’m with Rory on that one.
But McIlory’s comments are a hammer blow for golf at a time when it’s never been more difficult to attract players under 45 to the game.
Twenty years after Woods first burst onto the pro scene, the lack of diversity in the game is still as shocking as it’s ever been. The inescapable fact, and it pains me to say it, is that golf isn’t a game for the rest of us after all. It’s still, as Tiger Woods once said, a game “for white men dressed like black pimps.”
While it’s easy to see golf as being at a crossroads, the truth is it’s been at the same depressingly predictable crossroads for decades now. Many radical ideas have been mooted, from changing the format to a quicker game played in less than two hours to playing by the hour rather than the round, from simplifying the rulebook (not difficult) to even making the hole itself bigger.
But it’s still a game choking on its own chronic inability to move with the times, still a game putting up barriers wherever it can.
When I started writing this article, I sat down with my 13-year-old son, Frank, and played “PGA Tour” golf with him on his Xbox. We’ve been to the practice range a few times together and hit a few balls, but he, like all his friends, isn’t remotely interested in taking up the game, not when there’s soccer to be played or social media to be scrutinized.
So I asked him why he didn’t like playing golf.
“It’s just boring,” he shrugged, as he rolled in another monster putt to make birdie.
I didn’t have an answer.
Gavin Newsham is the author of “Two Tribes: The Rebirth of the Ryder Cup.”