My mother spent a lot of time in her youth (after college) skiing just as the sport was beginning, playing tennis on a clay court she and her cousin, Betty (no better Depression era names than Millie & Betty), and playing golf with things called a “mashie”, “spoon” and “niblick”. She was my role model in all things including sports, so those were the sports I aspired to play. During her grad school days in Wisconsin there was barely enough money to make rent, but when we moved to Maine in 1965 and she started making real money, all of those sports were suddenly available to me.
Maine calls itself Vacationland and there are lots of places to do all three sports for little more than the cost of the equipment. My first purchase at age 12 was a cheap set of golf clubs since I was determined to learn the game as soon as the snow melted. I spent the next three years eating, sleeping and dreaming about golf and skiing, depending on the season. I got reasonably good at both, actually getting to a 14 golf handicap at age 14. When we moved to Rome in 1968, I didn’t lose a beat on the skiing, since trips to the Apennines, Dolomites and Alps were pretty easy, but golf went back burner since there were very few courses in Italy in those days. We did go up to Fiuggi to play a few times, but mostly high school was a golf hiatus. In college, almost no students played golf in 1972 (a testament to Cornell’s marginal Ivy League status and the overhang of the Hippie culture), but I got a few rounds in on the Robert Trent Jones university course with my pal Mike Parkinson.
My early banking career days were dominated by golf. I was a member of the famous Westchester Country Club and also was the designated junior golf outing organizer for my bank. I honed my game and by 1990 was thinking that I would retire to a nice house on a golf course somewhere and live out my life with 9-18 holes each and every day. By the mid-90’s I had houses on two golf courses and seemed to be on track to being a golfing retiree. I had a nice custom set of clubs and had played many of the great courses around the U.S. from National Golf Links and Shinnecock Hills in the Hamptons to Pebble Beach, Spyglass and Cyprus Point on the Monterrey Peninsula. I even played the hard-to-get-on Muirfield and Greywalls on the Firth of Forth in Scotland, The Mid-Ocean Club in Bermuda and the Royal Course in Marrakech (even getting a hole-in-one on the “Bridget Bardot” par 3). There have always been FAR more avid, well-travelled and committed golfers than me, but I was reasonably engaged in the sport.
Then something changed. I have never figured out why, but my interest in golf suddenly flicked off like a light switch. For years I had thought how nice it would be to live somewhere that didn’t require an hour-long commute to a crowded golf club where a tee time and scheduling a group with whom to play was necessary. I envied people who lived near simple and unpretentious courses (preferably public courses that were reasonably well-maintained). Places like Southern California seemed to have such courses and sure enough, the area surrounding my hilltop has plenty of just that sort of course.
The analysis of golf participation trends are pretty well documented at this point. In the United States during the early 2000s, golf peaked with approximately 30 million players. After 2005, the sport experienced a gradual decline, with participation dropping to around 24.3 million players by 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic actually sparked a significant resurgence in golf participation, with the National Golf Foundation reporting the largest net increase in golfers in 17 years with around 3 million new players taking up the game and the number of rounds played increasing by about 14% compared to 2019. But most of that growth is coming from younger players while play among older folks is decidedly off. Internationally, golf has seen significant growth in Asia, particularly in countries like South Korea and China, while remaining relatively stable in traditional markets like the UK and Europe. This is the same trend that is occurring in the ski market as older skiers age-out and younger ones are finding it damn hard to afford what have become very upscale and expensive sports (meaning both skiing and golf). I even find it interesting that tennis is giving way to pickleball for all sorts of age-related reasons, but perhaps also because it takes up less than half the space of tennis and is therefore far less costly for participants.
I get asked every once in while if I play golf. Those who know me know my long history with golf and know better than to think I’m up for a game at this point. I don’t even own a set of golf clubs anymore, though I probably could rustle up a pair of golf shoes if I needed them. So, it tends to be new acquaintances that ask me about golf and if the occasion allows, I give them my golf history in short form. For some reason, I do not want to be put into that category of people who never learned how to play golf. For some strange reason, I prefer to be the guy who played so much golf that he grew tired of it and has decided that there are other better ways to spend 4-5 hours. I do not envy people who travel and want to play golf around the world. Both golf and skiing are a bitch as far as transporting your equipment. You have to really like golf and skiing to want to schlep that oversized baggage around the world…something I have done far too much of in my life.
Today I ran out for a bite of late lunch after a long morning of heavy-duty gardening, hoisting bark mulch bags and the even heavier gravel bags. Yesterday I played mechanic by replacing the dual 12V batteries (which weighed a ton, I might add) in my power wheelbarrow. Doing things like that and gardening are far more to my liking than golf. But when it was time for a late lunch, I drove down into the enclave of Hidden Meadows. We on this hilltop (approximately 50 homes) are not formally a part of Hidden Meadows (we are both less hidden and have no meadows to speak of), but since we are outside the confines of the City of Escondido and otherwise unattached municipality-wise, Hidden Meadows is our local hub. But Hidden Meadows’ downtown consists of a Cal Fire station, a small real estate office and two delis (one of which has a “public house” sit-down pub). Normally I would go there, but today I chose instead to go to the one other spot in the enclave and that is to the golf course clubhouse, which is always in search of a dining clientele. The club is owned by a very nice and very hard-working Chinese couple, who apparently are hoping to sell the golf course for development once they get approval to subdivide it. That means they keep the course in minimally acceptable shape and try as best they can to monetize the clubhouse by offering pizzas and BBQ, advertised the way a deli might with fading banner flags. It looks, when you go in, as though they get the normal golfer burger and beer custom, but not much more. For some reason, where the Sideyard Public House, a mere 200 yards away, has prospered, the clubhouse has fallen short.
So I ordered my lunch and sat and looked out at the golfers putting and chipping for practice and was reminded of when that was something I enjoyed doing. The whole vibe felt anachronistic. This was not what life in America is like today. There wasn’t a Millennial or GenZ-er in sight. That’s when I realized that I needed to ponder golf in the context of something from a bygone era…at least for me. I know my friend Steven, over in Palm Springs will not agree or understand this sentiment. The difference is that while Rory McIlroy is winning at Pebble Beach, Roy McAvoy is shanking clunkers in Tin Cup West Texas. I guess my memories belong with Roy more than Rory.