A LOT has changed in golf over the past 20 years. When I first stepped on to a bus with a set of clubs under my arm, people looked at me as if there was something wrong. I may as well have been wearing a monkey suit. Golf was a boring old man’s sport, not fit for 16-year-old kids.
Nowadays, things are different: if you get on a bus with a set of clubs, it’s more like having a surfboard under your arm. Why? Because Tiger Woods has made golf cool. Consequently, the industry is being infiltrated by forward thinkers, marketers who understand why golf is so exciting to people. In the future, the game will have to be much more competitive in how it goes about enticing people.
Despite the economic necessity to engage visitors, golf clubs still go out of their way to upset new members. What’s the first thing they give you when you join a club? A list of all the things you can’t do. So before you’ve even gone out on the course, there’s a culture of “woe betide you”. In future, golf clubs will have to be more like private gyms if they are to compete for your membership money. A bit of service really wouldn’t go amiss.
However, I can’t see any loosening in this obsession with the rules of the game. It’s actually one of the things that makes the sport great. Golf is 100 per cent self-regulatory. You have to know the rules to be able to play because there is no referee. Sure this means that you can easily cheat. But you will always go to bed knowing that everyone else played by the rules apart from you. Nicky Wire, the bass player from the Manic Street Preachers, got it spot on when he said: “Golf dignifies people. It makes a bad person a better person.” I can’t imagine a single person whose sense of morality and fair play would be adversely affected by taking up golf.
Golf fashion has a lot to do with the game’s new-found sense of self and if it carries on the way it’s going then you’ll soon need sunglasses every time you scan the fairways. Golfers don’t look like golfers anymore. Fashion labels such as JLindeberg and Peak Performance have turned the fairways into a sporting catwalk.
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Johan Lindeberg, the Swedish designer behind JLindeberg, maintains that golf is capable of changing the world. The premise is this: as most of the world’s most powerful people play golf, if you can make them dress differently, then you might be able to get them to think differently. I subscribe wholeheartedly to his scriptures and I’m sold on the image of world leaders, 20 years from now, donning figure-hugging purple Lindeberg attire and forming a new world order where everyone is chilled and all problems and disagreements are solved on the golf course.
In terms of technological change, golf is right up there with Formula One. It doesn’t seem that a week goes past without one of the major club manufacturers bringing out a new driver that hits the ball 20 yards farther than the last. Golf courses the world over will need to lengthen their holes in order to avoid becoming obsolete.
There are other possibilities: some have called for golf balls to be regulated so they don’t fly so far or for the golf hole to become bigger so it makes the game easier. Personally I don’t want the game itself to change at all. What I want is for the game’s governers to wake up and accept the fact that, if we want to compete with football and attract new players into the game, we have to turn golf into a brand — something that is easily identifiable, easily accessible and extraordinarily exciting.
The Tiger effect won’t be around for ever. In fact, in 20 years’ time he’ll be past 50 and some of his magic will have worn off. Let’s make hay now, while the world’s greatest ever player is still burning up the fairways.