Golf's Worst Trade-off: Exchanging Etiquette for Popularity

Golf has seen a massive rise in popularity since Tiger Woods' rise and falls. There are many other reasons as well, but I think no one will argue against his influence on the popularity of the sport. However, even at the height of Tiger Woods' fame, some people still thought of golf as a boring old man's sport. This has since the 2000s and 2010s changed massively. In my home country, South Africa, the sport has seen a massive increase in popularity, in part due to the local heroes like Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel, Trevor Immelman, and some of the young new guys like Christian Bezuidenhout and Garrick Higgo. The market for golf equipment exploded, golf club memberships rose, and finding a game at your local club became almost impossible. (I regularly struggle to get a game at my own home club.)

This is all good for the future of golf, because if the money gets poured into the game, it develops, and this development is good. I always marvel at the scale of an operation maintaining a golf course is. The amount of personnel that needs to be paid; the equipment that needs to be bought etc. etc. The more members a club has, and the more rounds that are played on the course, the more money the club has available to spend on these things, i.e. more personnel, equipment, etc. Hence, the better the experience the members will have if there are more members and more rounds being played.

This is where Golf made its worst trade-off: it exchanged etiquette for popularity. Let me explain. Golf, while it was an "old man's sport" was seen as a game of etiquette. There were "rules" beyond that of the game’s rules, that is, there was a specific form of respect that golfers needed. You never walked over someone’s line, your shadow was never near another player when they played, you stayed quiet when others played, etc., etc. These forms of respect were taught to you by the senior golfers who got taught by their dads or mothers or other senior golfers. In other words, the general trend was that seniors of the game taught young and new golfers the ways of golf, most importantly the etiquette. Bobby Jones famously said: "In golf, the customs and etiquette and decorum are as important as the rules of play."

With the popularity of golf in recent times, the relationship and line between senior golfers and junior young golfers got broken. Young golfers want to play golf as those on TV, like Tiger Woods et. al. Rather than getting introduced to the sport via a senior who teaches you the required etiquette and respect, your friends introduce you to the sport, or you see someone on TV, and you want to imitate them. This is not inherently bad. The growth of golf is dependent on these new golfers, but with this rise in popularity plus this drive towards profit, there needed to be a trade-off: and that was and still is respect and etiquette.

Do not get me wrong. There are senior golfers who are not very nice, and who also disrespect the etiquette. But there is today in golf a fundamental disregard to etiquette and respect. A game that was once built on the fundamentals of respecting the other players, respecting the course, showing etiquette, is today a sad resemblance of what it once was. Most golfers are familiar with the stories of disrespect and lack of etiquette. Divots that are not filled with sand, pitch marks on the green that does not get fixed, people that talk on your swing, people that act so rudely that you wonder where the respect is that once was there. Maybe the problem was there from the start, it is only now enhanced due to the fact that more people play the sport. But I still think there is some divide between modern golf and golf of yesteryear. I did not experience the golf from those earlier eras, but I got taught by golfers who came from that era. My understanding of golf, etiquette, and respect is deeply rooted in the experiences of “old-time” golfers. A deep tension is created with those old-time values and modern golf: people today are generally just rude, self-centered, and show a clear lack of respect for the course and golf’s etiquette.

This is a bit of ranting, and some will probably disagree with me. But I recently scanned the subreddit for golf, and one of the top-rated posts for the month is someone explaining their bad experience of a rude golfer. See the post here. These stories are not uncommon. We played various games where the people behind us feels that we play too slowly, so they just hit their drives into us. People do not play golf with etiquette and respect anymore. It is a shame. I think this is in part due to the drive to make golf more popular, and the fundamental trade-off will, in the long run, be one that will cost golf dearly.