{"id":5356,"date":"2011-08-22T00:53:51","date_gmt":"2011-08-22T07:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/robertfagan.com\/?p=5356"},"modified":"2011-08-22T00:53:51","modified_gmt":"2011-08-22T07:53:51","slug":"equipment-and-golf-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/commentary\/5356\/equipment-and-golf-challenges","title":{"rendered":"Equipment and Golf Challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a>Longer golf courses will no longer be economically sustainable! <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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Tennis' John McEnroe<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently heard a sports program on tennis discuss the development of the tennis game and its growth challenges.\u00a0 John McEnroe was discussing how the technology in tennis rackets increased power between 20 and 40 percent. \u00a0The tennis industry then responded by slowing down both the court surfaces and the ball to retain the integrity of the game and bring back the rallies, the footwork, movements, and skills back into the game.<\/p>\n

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As we look around to baseball, we see where professionals play with wooden bats whereas lower levels compete using aluminum bats.\u00a0 Baseball can\u2019t easily build bigger stadium in the way that some (not all) golf course can add distance.\u00a0 That distance and acreage adds lots of costs to the game that is making an elite game further beyond the reach of more people while making the game take longer to play, thus ruining the golf course business model.<\/p>\n

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Baseball has found it necessary for professionals to play with a different equipment - wooden bats and not aluminum ones.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The lessons of baseball and tennis are relevant to the challenges that golf faces.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it time that golf consider wake up and open itself to some fine-tuning, especially when the game in America is now into its second decade of decline?<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The United States Golf Association does not operate in an easy environment with equipment manufacturers needing to continually enhance their equipment at natural odds to change the game.\u00a0 That said, the results indicate that the USGA has not been been effective in keeping the game relevant for the space, cost, and time available for people in a rapidly changing socio-economical environment.\u00a0 If the USGA is to remain relevant and the game economically sustainable, changes will be necessary.\u00a0 It is no wonder that alternative golf ideas are springing forth.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Again looking to other sports, when skiing fell into a decline, it opened itself up to snow-boarding.\u00a0 So too, it would seem that golf must consider new ideas to remain not only relevant from an interest standpoint, but economically sustainable.<\/p>\n

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The game of golf is currently a symbolic reflection of the combination of aluminum baseball bats and giant super powerful tennis rackets with the possible solutions not too far removed from snowboarding.\u00a0 The romantic notion that experts and novices play with the same equipment no longer works.\u00a0 The powerful skilled players have distanced themselves from relatively skilled amateurs.\u00a0 If golf is going to continue to allow the juiced-up equipment into the game and dictate longer and more challenging golf courses to accommodate a tiny, but powerful minority of highly skilled players, they would do better to allow the recreational player to get corresponding, but currently non-conforming game improvement advances.\u00a0 The other more sustainable alternative is to scale back the equipment starting with a shorter, higher spinning tournament ball for elite competition.\u00a0 An even more effective solution would be to shrink both the size of golf courses and the capability of the equipment.\u00a0 While we don\u2019t have to go to the extreme of the \u201cCayman balls and courses\u201d concept that was floated years ago, something in that direction begins to make more and more sense.<\/p>\n

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The Cayman Golf Ball<\/p><\/div>\n

There are two major golf forces that have been dictating the direction of golf over the last thirty years.\u00a0 They are the equipment manufacturers that have a short-term profit motivation in grabbing for an increasing portion of a shrinking pie.\u00a0 The other major force is the PGA TOUR and they are driven by growing viewership, advertising, and purses by creating more exciting players who hit the ball longer and longer.\u00a0 While both groups have a secondary interest in growing the game, they are unwhittingly sucking the life from it.<\/p>\n

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We can talk all we want about the beauty of all golfers playing by the same rules and using the same equipment, but that no longer is working.\u00a0 Like many, I have long been a “traditionalist,” but the landscape has been changing so quickly and dramatically to not consider changes.\u00a0 With land and time more valuable than previously, the old standards no longer apply.\u00a0 Until golf addresses its equipment issues in a more demonstrative manner, its leaders punctuate the decline of golf making it less sustainable in many ways for many reasons.<\/p>\n

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    Longer golf courses will no longer be economically sustainable!   I recently heard a sports program on tennis… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":5357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5975,6127,6569,6570,6731,65746,334,4907,5048],"tags":[1180,1046270,4192,83,4018,90654],"class_list":["post-5356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-long-island-golf-assoc","category-so-cal-golf-assoc","category-azga","category-conn-golf-assoc","category-indiana-golf-assoc","category-mass-golf-assoc","category-commentary","category-oregon-golf-assoc","category-alternative-golf-assoc","tag-baseball","tag-golf","tag-tennis","tag-usga","tag-rules","tag-equipment-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/33\/2011\/08\/golf-course-st-george-utah1.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5356"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5378,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5356\/revisions\/5378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/robertfagan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}