The golf industry from about '90 to the mid-2000s “boomed, overbuilt and overpromised,” and now it is “paying the price,” according to John Paul Newport of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. Estimates have the game "losing one million golfers a year, net.” The “deep question golf is asking itself these days is wherein lies its soul: with the ancient game itself, played as it has been for hundreds of years, or with the modern industry that has grown up around it?” Golf's leadership is “responding to the situation with more urgency than ever.” The PGA of America is “pushing a new, all-points initiative called Golf 2.0, whose goal is to make the game ‘more relevant’ to lapsed golfers and others, especially women and minorities, it has identified as underserved.” USGA President Glen Nager, who assumed the position earlier this month, best represented “the predicament for golf's traditionalists” in a speech last week, saying that making golf more enjoyable to play, more affordable and more welcoming must be done "without fundamentally changing the game itself." Newport noted the “thrust of the Golf 2.0 initiative is customer service -- to give customers more of what they want, or would want if it were actually available: set-aside times and places for families and beginners to play, more leagues and competitions, more accessible instruction, friendlier staff.” An “allied initiative, begun last summer and co-sponsored (unusually) by the USGA and the PGA, is Tee It Forward, which encourages golfers to play from tees that make courses shorter and more fun.” Most of these solutions, and “others like them, are an attempt to return golf to simpler, less fancified times.” But opponents worry about “promulgating alternate sets of rules for players with less patience and fewer skills; legalizing clubs and balls that make the game easier; doubling the size of the hole.” Newport: “The battle for golf's soul may just be getting under way” (WSJ.com, 2/11).
