The Pellucid Perspective - September 2020 - 6

THE GAME
OF GOLF

Golf: A Game? A Sport? An Adventure?
By Stuart Lindsay

or the first time in a long time, the golf world is buzzing with good news. The July Rounds Report from Golf
Datatech came in with another dazzling double-digit increase. With July being the peak rounds month of any year; it's
a big deal - we erased the pandemic induced losses and year-todate rounds are up for the year.
As we talk to clients across the US, the overriding question
is whether golf will be able to sustain this burst of momentum.
We also have to remember that rounds are not as important as
whether your bank balance is better than it was a year ago.With
added costs of customer/employee safety and pandemic restrictions on events and F&B service; there are challenges for many
facilities that simply increasing rounds will not necessarily address. But more good news is that the courses we talk to do have
more money in the bank.
How these course have overcome the Covid-19 obstacles
is varied, complex and full of unique solutions. The consistent
theme, however, is customer identification and regular segmented communication - more on that later.
When I wrote about Sam Ingwerson's book "Dangerous
Beauty" a couple months ago, I emphasized the golf course
design aspects of his theories. He also wrote about the "game"
of golf - and the sociological aspects of games providing relief
from the stresses of regular daily routines of work and other
fundamental responsibilities.
If we look at "games", we can talk about a bunch of both

Trivial Pursuit and Cards Against Humanity are subject to the
whims of society - how many people know how to play "Whist"?

6 The Pellucid Perspective

ancient and modern examples of what people have used to add
enjoyment to how they have spent their leisure time. Chess and
Backgammon have been around for centuries - one required
only skill within a framework of rules and the other introduced
the element of chance with the rolling of dice combined with
the strategic moving of pieces. There are now thousands of
"games" to choose from - some, like Bridge, have survived for
centuries. Others, like Trivial Pursuit and Cards Against Humanity are subject to the whims of society - how many people
know how to play "Whist"?
We can look at Monopoly or Clue, Life or Chutes and Ladders. We can look at Modern Warfare, Forge of Empires or
Madden 2020 and see variant degrees of skill and luck - but
the overarching component is the desire to compete. Individually, or in a group, it is part of human nature to compete - first
and foremost to improve our own performance and secondly to
measure our performance against others.
Then, of course, there is the question of when a physical activity becomes a "sport" and then becomes a game. In the words
of Mark Knopfler, an astute social critic using rock & roll as his
medium of expression, "first came the churches, then came the
schools, then came the lawyers and then came the rules" (Dire
Straits, Telegraph Road, 1982). The one common denominator
of all games is a set of rules.
Archery was originally created as an improved way for
people to hunt from a greater distance. Beyond hunting and
warfare, skill competitions naturally evolved to measure one archer's skill against others. As an example of "games" going in
and out of fashion; The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones
have sparked enough renewed interest that some park districts
are considering archery ranges as an alternative use for golf facilities.
Bobby Fischer's match against Boris Spassky in 1972 caused
an explosion in chess participation that hasn't been seen since.
I'll always wonder if Jonathan Byrd's snide comments about Tiger Woods rollerblading in Spandex single handedly killed that
fad before rollerblade hockey could become another option for
television ratings development.
As we have seen, golf is also subject to the whims of fashion. Not just over the last 20 years, but the Harry Varden/Francis
Ouimet/Bobby Jones boom was followed by a huge decline. The
next boom fueled by Arnold Palmer and expanded television coverage was followed by a bust so bad that the wise men assembled
at Westchester in the 1980's declared that golf was dying.
Some can point to the "build a course a day" prescription
presented at Westchester in 1988 as the reason for the boom in
golf participation of the 1990's - golf became even more accessible than it did during the other building boom in the 1960's
when we added more courses on a percentage basis than we did
from 1990 - 2005. However, as Jim Koppenhaver pointed out,
the mix of what we built was predominantly "penal, pristine and
September 2020

The Pellucid Perspective - September 2020

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