[Advancing the game] Three profiles in golf

When was the last time we heard an accurate assessment of the national golf economy? Not in this century. We’re constantly being told rounds are down here and there, equipment manufacturers are losing ground, golf courses are closing, and once secure trade shows have become more vulnerable. It’s difficult not to think the golf economy is in gathering decline, even though this isn’t the case. For example:

1. Golf courses are closing at a higher rate in recent years because they were increasingly overproduced during the late 1990s when annual golf course openings approached 500 each year compared with a national average of about 240 openings from 1940 trough the early 1990s. The situation is very similar to when the oversupply of airlines forced Pan Am, Eastern, TWA, Piedmont, Florida and other airlines to close. Yet, air travel has continued to grow and expand considerably for decades since then. Golf is in a similar position today.

2. We’re told golf isn’t healthy because player development has been stagnant for the past six years. But we’re not told, within the same context, that while golf attracts 3.5 million new golfers annually (a truer reflection on the game’s health), it loses a similar amount each year, basically because of the systemic lack of adequate teaching throughout the game. (See my June 2004 column.) Naturally, stagnant player development also stagnates equipment sales and the number of annual rounds played – leaving bad weather to account for the 2-percent to 4-percent annual rounds declines we see regionally.

Therefore, the above two scenarios suggest more widespread miscalculation than a declining industry. This leads to the observation that golf is essentially recession-proof because the miscues profiled above don’t financially impact the game’s more than 25 million players who will continue to play and spend as they’re accustomed to. Golf is blessed further because history shows whenever the national economy tightens, people play more golf and attend more movies.

Golf is a vibrant, resilient game that will always be able to grow an industry, provided it learns to get out of its own way, which, as a relatively young industry, it will learn to do, but not at the accelerated, artificial pace the ever-eager manufacturing, development and the service communities seek. Teach the game, and the players, rounds and sales will come in appropriate due course. (See my June 2004 column.)

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A historic shower
When the GCSAA board voted to establish the annual Old Tom Morris Award in the spring of 1982 and designate Arnold Palmer to be the initial recipient, I, as executive director, was given the assignment of personally inviting Arnold to receive the award at the 1983 GCSAA Conference in Atlanta.

After getting in touch with Palmer’s long-time manager, Doc Giffin, we agreed the natural place for me to meet with Arnold would be at the 1982 USGA Senior Open Championship at the Portland (Ore.) Golf Club where Arnold would be playing and I would be working as a rules official.

Once we were on site, Giffin tried but couldn’t arrange a meeting Thursday through Saturday that week because the extensive media pursuit of Arnold made it impossible. Finally, Giffin guaranteed a meeting with Arnold following play on Sunday. True to Doc’s word, I extended the most sensitive invitation in the GCSAA’s noble history, arguably, to Arnold Palmer while he was scrubbing down under a shower in a room filled to capacity with players and blinding steam. I was wearing no more than a towel. Arnold graciously and proudly accepted the invitation in the name of his father, Deacon, a respected career superintendent.

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Golf’s Johnny Appleseed
Through the early 1800s, John Chapman roamed the Northwest Territory (from which Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois were later formed) with a bag of apple seeds on his back and a vision of the wilderness blossoming with apple trees. His sturdy, young trees and the hundreds of nurseries he created lightened the hearts of many settlers. John Chapman died on March 18, 1845 at 71, forever to be known affectionately as Johnny Appleseed.

The game of golf has its own modern version of Johnny Appleseed: Melvin B. Lucas Jr., a GCSAA past president who’s been “roaming” the European continent for more than 15 years sowing seeds to bring well-grassed golf courses and the economic development these golf courses deliver to fruition. To date, Mel has grown-in more than 20 golf courses throughout eight countries, from Sweden to Slovenia to Spain.

Because of the inherent difficulty of growing grass in the heavy soils of Europe, Mel assumes the role of an ocean-crossing, grow-in superintendent for each of his European projects to ensure optimum results and to provide a high-level teaching experience for the local turf managers involved and those auditing each project.

Furthermore, Mel Lucas has brought his unique expertise to the following: (i) helping establish Europe’s only washed sod production farm (Austrian-based Zehetbauer Fertigrasen) that supplies quality bentgrass green sod throughout Europe; (ii) bringing aspiring European-based assistants and interns to the seven-week University of Massachusetts’ Winter School for Turf Managers Program; (iii) helping establish the Slovenian Greenkeepers Association, which became the first international GCSAA affiliated chapter; and (iv) helping establish one of Europe’s foremost educational programs – the annual Slovenian Greenkeepers Conference – where Mel has been instrumental in inviting one or two of the world’s most respected agronomists each year to present seminar programs that attract more than a hundred greenkeepers and academics from all over Europe to a country with only eight golf courses.

While serving as one of America’s best ambassadors of good will throughout Europe, Mel Lucas isn’t only helping to set a quality standard for growing in golf courses, but he’s also helping to grow a profession of well-educated, solidly performing greenkeepers who will drive golf course development and the ongoing maintenance of golf courses throughout the continent to close the performance gap that exists between European greenkeepers and American superintendents. Thank you Mel for advancing the game in your true inimitable style. GCN