“If we get all of us working together rather than battling each other, it’s going to help a lot."
Jim Achenbach reports that PING CEO John Solheim is "positively effervescent" after the U.S.G.A. and the R&A met with golf equipment manufacturers in Vancouver to talk about how they can all get along better.
“I thought it was exceptional,” Solheim said Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe how well it went. The openness was really good – on both sides. In fact, in all the times we’ve met with the USGA and R&A, I’ve never seen this kind of openness. It was remarkable.”
As one scribe remarked today when I told him of PING's jubilation, it's about as comforting as learning that an oil company is praising a new piece of environmental legislation.
E. Michael Johnson wrote this summary of what the entities tried to cover and it's quite a long list. Naturally, this gave me a warm chuckle:
Another common thread was that one of the goals for any equipment rule change should be to grow the game of golf, and that if a rule change is counter-productive to that, then it should not be implemented.
Code for, a distance rollback would drive people from the game and right now it's so healthy, we can't have something like that!
Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 08:43 PM
Reader Comments (16)
That might be the most idiotic thing I've ever read. We most certainly could grow the game if it were easier, so let's the make the size of the hole as big as a basketball hoop. All in favor . . . ?
However, it is important that some of the myths get toned down a bit so that his good personal qualities don't get overshadowed.
That's been my theory for about 25 years.
Ely Callaway brought the $500 driver, and publicly-traded equipment companies to the game, and it's been a downhill slide ever since.
IMHO, you can pretty easily argue that every improvment brought in the name of bottom line for stockholders has hurt the long-term success of golf.
I started playing seriously in about 1960-62, and the old farts who played at my home course were all playing tiny wooden woods and blade irons. They knew golf was hard, and they enjoyed the challenge. But they weren't chasing performance by buying a new driver every six months, and there wasn't a whole lot being done to make the courses harder to "protect" them from golfers.
Today, that same demographic is where I stand, and most of my friends are being absolutely beaten to death by narrow fairways, tall rough and superspeed greens. Worse, their course is green an wet al summer, so they can't hit the ball as far as the same guys did back in the 60s on unirrigated fairways.
The new players today seem to believe that exotic game-improvement clubs have made the game easier--they haven't--and so when they can't break 100 they soon get frustrated by their 5-hour rounds and crappy scores.
K
Golf (and many businesses and industries that are much more important) are f*cked because in the current so-called economy (the root of which is household, we should remember) the following factors are weighted much more heavily than the long-term health of the enterprise and the political economy and civil society in which it exists: (1) quarterly profits as opposed to long-term profitability, and (2) so-called analysts' expectations that lead to pump-and-dump stock price manipulations which in turn determine executive compensation, which in turn lead to pump-and-dump stock price manipulations, ad infinitum. Until the whole thing collapses. I could go on, but these two factors just about cover it when you consider their ramifications. I have nothing against business or the stock market. I love business. It provides me with many wonderful things, including the stuff in my golf bag. But I do view Wall Street as a used car lot writ large, without the utility of a real used car dealership that can provide transportation to many. Is it an accident that so many masters of the universe manage to walk away from the carnage they cause with $50-200 million platinum parachutes? You know, if some of that "creative destruction" were wreaked on a Hank Paulson, Robert Nardelli, Al Dunlap, Robert Rubin, or Carly Fiorina just once in a while I'd probably agree with you. At least a little bit. Instead the destruction is virtually always visited upon those who actually produce the products or services and are much less able to take the hit. But this is a feature, not a bug, in the current system. Isn't it?
Note added in proof: kenoneputt covers the practical effect this "modern corporate business" has had on golf, much better than I have.
The game has lost its purity together with pretty much all the classic golf courses which have increasingly had to be 'tricked up' to compensate for the modern ball. For example, take "fairway bunkers". Wouldn't it be more accurate to now refer to them as "in the rough bunkers"? That would certainly be a more accurate description of the bunkering at my links course.
Ky, I'm buying everything you say too about the shortsightedness of mgmt at publicly traded companies. So I hope you are buying all your insurance from mutuals (State Farm, Northwestern, USAA, etc...) and none from the publicly traded (Travelers, Allstate, MetLife). And support your local hardware store, don't shop at Home Depot. Bank at the local savings bank (mine called me about a heads up on something yesterday, BAC would NEVER do that) instead of Bank of America. Etc, etc, etc...
c&c, what can we do? What we can do is get the bozos off the board at the club and beat some sense into the collective heads of memberships. A great little TIllinghast track I play kinda regularly on Long Island is proposing a new irrigation system to the membership -- it will require an assessment. They tell me it's because "we can't get the grass to grow too good in some of the remote parts of the rough". Well no shit. So I marched a couple of them over an aerial photo of the course from about 80 years ago that hangs in the men's bar and pointed out that they now have about 1000 extra, and unnecessary, trees. Cut about a whole bunch of those down and your problem is solved. And this is a club that's in a financial pinch, I cannot believe they are proposing something so unnecessary that also will require an assessment -- talk about a membership killer!!
It's on us fellas!!!