(Parting shots) Golf goes 'all in'

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, don’t have cable or have been flirting with the Amish lifestyle, you might have noticed there’s been a teensy, tiny upswing of interest in poker.

We live in a country where Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Annie Duke, Doyle Brunson and even nerdnik ESPN commentator Norman Chad are rock stars. It is, in short, a phenomenon. You could even call it a poker boom.

Hmmm … where have we heard that word “boom” before? Sounds familiar to me for some reason.

Statistics are sketchy, but as many as 50 million Americans are playing poker of some kind right now. It’s a huge industry by any account. Major newspapers and magazines are writing about it. Does that sound familiar, too?

Quite simply, poker is the new golf. Just when we thought the soccer dad trend had sucked all the wind from our sails, along comes poker to drain us further like a hungry vampire snacking at a blood bank.

But, rather than lament our fate, let’s compare and contrast ourselves to poker and find out what we can learn from our friends in the smoky casinos and online sites that comprise the latest, greatest leisure explosion.

Poker vs. golf
Poker is incredibly easy to play for the average schmuck. Like golf, poker is a deceptively simple game. It combines skill and luck to varying degrees at various levels. The better you are, the less important luck is to your success. And, just as a high-handicap hacker will hole one out for an ace occasionally, an idiot amateur potentially can win a big pot against a great poker player.

The difference, however, becomes clear throughout time. A duffer could never win the U.S. Open playing four rounds over 72 grueling holes. Conversely, an amateur walked away with more than $5 million in the World Series of Poker in 2004. Our game just isn’t as accessible to Joe Sixpack as poker.

Our great opportunity to bring the aura of accessibility back to golf is the handicap. We seem to have forgotten to promote the basic idea that in regular play, a first-time duffer could actually take money from a scratch player if she plays better than her handicap and he plays worse. We should go back to the idea of promoting golf as the only egalitarian sport that uses handicapping to make play between any two individuals – no matter what their skill level – relatively fair and even.

Poker has personalities who seem like folks who could be living next door. In golf, we have Tiger, Ernie, Phil, Annika and Jack. Do you live in the same neighborhood as any of them? Aside from the random Cinderella story like Ben Curtis or Calvin Peete (Whatever happened to him, anyway?), our leading figures seem like untouchable Hollywood celebrities. Even Tiger, our poster boy for attracting minorities, grew up in a stable, middle-class Southern California household.

Poker, on the other hand, seems to put the spotlight on guys with a three-day growth of beard, bad personal habits and a potbelly. Watch any given night on ESPN, and you’ll see some doofus at the final table of a big tournament wearing a wrinkled T-shirt and $6 sunglasses winning big stacks of cash.

Why can’t we spotlight more unlikely folks playing golf and having a ball? Well, maybe we can if we consider that.

Poker doesn’t put on a false front about itself. This contrast in styles really came home to me recently when I was watching golf on TV and saw one of the commercials for the well-intentioned but ill-fated “Play Golf America” campaign. In case you haven’t seen these, they are a slickly produced series of promos featuring deliriously happy people playing golf. At the end of each, a celebrity (Roger Clemens, Ray Romano, etc.) comes on and hollers, “Play golf America!” at the camera. OK, we get it.

This particular spot featured a foursome of upscale, extremely well-dressed, racially balanced people playing golf. At the end, zillionaire actor Samuel L. Jackson comes on and tells us (kind of creepily) to, “Play golf America!” Yeah, there’s a good spokesman: a low-handicapper movie star who could be doing any damn thing he wants with his spare time. How exactly does that appeal to the blue-collar, lunch-bucket toters we need to attract?

A great alternative to this approach would be to produce documentary-style commercials featuring real guys playing at some muni course in Hackensack, N.J. They’d be topping balls, gambling, smoking cigars and burping during each others’ backswings. At the end, John Daly would come on and drawl, “Hey you mullet-haired, tank-top-wearing, cheap-beer-drinking clowns: Play some damn golf already!” Now that might bring some new dollars to the market.

It’s easier to successfully sneak off to play poker. The old “I need to go to the hardware store for a couple of hours” excuse rarely works when your wife hears the rattle of golf clubs being placed in the car trunk and you arrive home with the telltale untanned left hand from your glove. Poker? No problem (except for the empty wallet).

Cheating has very different consequences. Shave a couple of strokes off your score or use the old foot wedge, and you’ll probably get a dirty look from your opponent. Slip an extra king into your hand to fill out a straight, and you might be facing the business end of a sawed-off shotgun. The advantage goes to golf on that one, I guess.

Stiff competition
All right, gentle reader, I’ve had my fun with the poker vs. golf question today (It’s been on my mind because my brother is actually a professional poker player who competed in the World Series of Poker in Vegas this year.), but believe it or not, there’s a point:

When it comes to our business success, we are no longer competing for share of mind, share of wallet or share of market. We are competing for share of time. Poker – like Little League, pee-wee soccer, increased work loads, church, dance recitals, books, reruns of “Hee Haw,” etc., etc., etc. – is one more thing golf must out-compete for the 24 precious hours a day each consumer is given. How can your course win that big game? GCN

Pat Jones is president of Flagstick LLC, a consulting firm that provides sales and marketing intelligence to green-industry businesses. He can be reached at psjhawk@cox.net or 440-478-4763.