Golf is Bigger than Hollywood

EATGOLF! MAGAZINE….‘Golf is Bigger than Hollywood’ !

Forgive me, dear readers, for starting off a golfing article by referring to washing machines, dishwashers, cookers and microwaves, but these items of domestic, labour-saving necessity are, in fact, relevant to the subject under review.

That subject is money. And the appliances just mentioned are reported to form the only segment of corporate America – and that probably relates closely to corporate world – that is financially bigger than golf.

Just ponder that for a second.

OK?  Has it sunk in yet? Well, now I’ve a real blockbuster of a statement: financially speaking, GOLF IS BIGGER THAN HOLLYWOOD. And, in the long-term, not even the worldwide credit crunch is going to change that.

Assuming that the figures in front of me are accurate, (and since their source is an impeccable one as shown on the graphics, I’ve no reason to doubt it), then you can forget Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Titanic and all that stuff. If you want to talk top dollar then, second only in the US market place to carpet sweepers, tellies and the like, comes golf.

The figures to support such a huge observation are elsewhere on this page and I’m excluding them here on the basis that the more zeros you add to zillions and trillions in fiscal matters the more confusing it all becomes.

So we’ll leave all that to the auditors and market researchers to sort out, and maybe dispute, and just think about why we can even contemplate how golf has grown so much in recent years that, rightly or wrongly, it can even be debated at such a level.

Just think about it: you’re preparing for your regular weekend four ball. You don your special apparel…trousers or skirt, shirt or blouse, depending on gender, sweater, maybe even logo socks. You load into your car a set of clubs, in a bag, possibly with a trolley, one requiring a battery, maybe.

You may stop off at the garage and fill up with petrol, buy a snack for halfway around the course. At the club you put on your golf shoes, unearth your glove, get out your bag of practice balls, some might have a lesson with the pro.

 If the weather is bad out come the waterproofs and the umbrella. Some hire a buggy, and in that buggy there may be a GPS system. At the club there are staff who earn their money from golf…PGA pros, greenkeepers, admin people, bar and kitchen staff, drinks, food.

If it’s a pay-as-your-pay course you’ve a green fee to pay…or maybe you paid for an annual membership…and that’s a few bob, make no mistake. Heavens above you haven’t hit a ball in earnest yet, but you and a few million others around the world represent part of a global golf economy that is inflating in size faster even than Tiger Woods’ investment portfolio.

And we’ve only talked about the handicap golfer. How much do you add on for the top professional stuff, all those tours with huge prize funds, the sponsors and their guests, the golf industry and their costs, the players with the travel and accommodation, the spectators, entry fees, their catering, their clothes.

Golf is expanding in popularity as never before with markets in Eastern Europe, Australia, Asia including China, the Far East and getting bigger and bigger all over the place, by the year with so many new courses being built…Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, Poland etcetera, etcetera…that it’s almost beyond comprehension.

It was reported by Sports Marketing Surveys in 2006 that ‘on average’ eighty-three new golf courses are completed in Europe each year.

Also, don’t forget, around those course almost inevitably now, there emerges a luxury hotel and high-quality housing developments requiring roads and the necessary infrastructure of electricity, gas, water. (Plenty of work there for bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, road surfacing crews and all the other sundry trades folk).

Once you start trying, as I just have, to think of all the ways that golf contributes to world economies, it truly never ends. We haven’t even got around yet to TV, radio, newspapers, books, videos, training aids, the Orlando Trade Show, the Munich Trade Show, computer games.

I recall once that the Dave Thomas, the former leading world player and now a semi-retired, golf course designer, observing in the quiet manner of his, that wherever golf took a hold, affluence followed in that region.

It’s true isn’t it? You can’t say that about football, cricket, cinema or any other activity that I can think of except, of course, tourism, and golf is playing an ever more significant part in that particular activity.

At the risk of being dubbed a ‘starry-eyed optimist’, and where golf is concerned I admit it with brass knobs on, all I can see for golf on a global, rather than local perspective, in the foreseeable future, is growth, growth, growth. And then some…

Due to my good fortune in being closely associated with the PGAs of Europe, and hearing all that it does to promote and spread the game by encouraging new countries to start with the tried and tested structure of a three-year training programme for PGA professionals, it is the only conclusion one can reach.

We hear a great deal now, and rightly so, of the explosion of interest in Eastern Europe…Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and surrounding countries, but the story doesn’t end there.

Throughout Scandinavia, from Sweden to Denmark, from Norway to Finland, and even across to Iceland, where the golfing story started sooner than in Eastern Europe, for political reasons, new courses are being built at this very moment, and newcomers are taking their first swing.

What the general public don’t hear so much about is the way golf has taken root in South America. Argentina has been producing fine players for fifty years or more but in the last ten years or so the Golf Development Programme, (a joint initiative between The R&A and The PGAsE  and funded by surpluses from The Open Championship), has taken Consultants/Tutors into such countries as Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and others, including in Central America.

South America is already making a significant impact on European golf with the Chilean Felipe Aguilar having followed the Argentinean lead by winning the recent Jakarta Astro Indonesian Open. There will be others….

OK, the figures shown here are impressive but beyond them, when you take into account all the spin offs referred to in the beginning of this article, it is impossible to comprehend just how massive golf has become in the world economy

To quote a catch-phrase from the famous musical Al Jolson,  a Hollywood favourite of yesteryear, before golf had the impertinence to become a bigger money-spinner, “ You Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ yet….”

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