Providing you’ve taken a break from bashing your head repeatedly against the television screen, cursing at a bloke called Craig Joubert and muttering, mumbling and moaning about the teeth-grinding wretchedness of Scotland’s exit from the Rugby World Cup, you may have noticed that it could cost 40 million quid to repair Big Ben. Now, that’s a heck of a lot of bing for your bong and if it goes wrong there may not be much ding let alone dong. Couldn’t they just drop old Ben in at Timpsons? “I’ve got a couple of keys to cut, a Pewter tankard to engrave and one or two memorial brass plaques to buff up but give me an hour or so and we’ll have him tick-tocking away quite the thing.”
Time waits for no man, or even a 96 metre high time piece with a sole purpose to tell the time. In these trying times for golf clubs, meanwhile, the clock appears to be ticking. Last week, Blairbeth Golf Club, on Glasgow’s southside, closed for good after 105 years in existence. Over the past couple of years, the closures have gathered pace. Torphin Hill, Lothianburn, Mouse Valley, Castle Park and Rutherford Castle have all shut up shop while there are many more eeking out the kind of hand-to-mouth existence that would have Oliver Twist saying “there you go, have some of mine”.
It’s hardly surprising that the doors are being bolted shut, of course. There remains a sizeable imbalance in supply and demand. Over the past 20 years, there was a 20 per cent growth in courses while, in the same period, the amount of actual golf club members remained, at best, static. Scotland has one course for every 9800 people. The nearest to that figure in Europe is in England where it's one per 28,000. It terms of variety and opportunity, the home of golf is, well, just that. For the nomadic golfer, who can feast on green fee savers and pay-as-you-play offers, this is a time of plunder. For club memberships, though, the saturated market and changing consumer patterns continue to bring considerable challenges.
Dwindling members, tumbling revenues, declining participation, the impact in clubhouse takings of the new drink driving laws, soggy peak summer seasons? It's a sentence that's about as upbeat as reading the list of repair jobs needed on Big Ben. Of course, there are many clubs that have shaken off the conservative, ‘it’s aye been’ mentality and have adopted a more progressive approach to the problems caused by the shifting social and economic sands of the current golfing climate by offering a variety of membership packages to cater for modern needs. A response to the changing demands and desires doesn’t always work though. Speaking to a well-kent Scottish golf magazine, the captain at Blairbeth stated that the club went to every school in the vicinity offering junior memberships up to the age of 18 for just £50 a year. “Not one joined,” said the captain. The writing was on the wall. Just a few days before Blairbeth closed for business, there was sprightly news from the European Tour and its national survey of golf in the UK which showed that over 11 million people (9.3 million adults and 1.3 million juniors) were actively engaged with golf in some form. The report didn’t simply focus on the traditional 18-hole approach, it took into account a variety of golfing fixes, from driving ranges, pitch-and-putt, nine hole courses, par-3 layouts and even computer games and simulators. In these hysterical times when you can dig up a stat to say everything is rosy one minute and everything is doomed the next, the tour’s survey tried to gauge an overall view that showed how participation is evolving. Huge numbers of people are still playing the game, they are just playing it differently …and in this correspondent’s case, playing it appallingly.
The face of golf continues to change. Golf clubs are being forced to change too but the harsh reality is that increased closures are going to be par for the course in the coming years.
AND ANOTHER THING
At 23, Argentina’s Emiliano Grillo won on his PGA Tour debut in the Frys.com Open on Sunday. Over in Korea, Lexi Thompson won her sixth LPGA Tour title at the age of just 20. The previous weekend, 21-year-old Matt Fitzpatrick won his first European Tour event in the British Masters. Here in Scotland, we still await the emergence of a new young gun of our own. At 31, Scott Jamieson is the youngest Scottish male golfer on the main circuit. There won’t be any new faces coming up from the Challenge Tour – Jamie McLeary and Andrew McArthur are 30-somethings who are course for promotion but have been up and down before – while Bradley Neil, the 19-year-old rookie, still has two stages of the qualifying school to negotiate after a tough start to life as a pro. In this increasingly youthful game of instant impacts, you can easily get left behind.
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