I’m Tiger Woods, And I’m Old

By Spencer Hall
Remember Nike’s “I’m Tiger Woods” youth golf commercials where children of different races all pause, look into the camera, and announce “I’m Tiger Woods”? Judging from this morning’s New York Times piece on the decline of golf’s popularity over the past decade, the average Tiger Woods fan looks less like an apple-cheeked youth golfer, and more like this:
[img=http://i.tsn.com/i/photos/20080221/86936.jpg]
Writing in the “observed from the planet Zenon-X-7” tone the Times adopts when addressing the issue of sports:
[quote="The New York Times"]The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.
More troubling to golf boosters, the number of people who play 25 times a year or more fell to 4.6 million in 2005 from 6.9 million in 2000, a loss of about a third. [/quote]
The article falls all over itself attempting to explain the cause behind golf’s flat growth curve: The economy and subsequent corporate cost-cutting, lazy kids (always getting on my lawn, but still obese!), the failure of golf to include families in an era when schedules are made ever tighter and tighter by work and family.
Yet the article fails to consider one thing: Perhaps golf isn’t a sport that will, by design, grow into a sport with a constant growth rate in terms of the people playing it. By design, it’s a grotesquely extravagant sport in terms of space utilized, equipment needed, and time spent playing it. It is a sport that requires a certain amount of built-in leisure time, something all but a thin slice of Americans do not have a lot of just sitting around unused.
It’s Judge Smails sport at heart: A lazy, contemplative, expensive sport that takes scads of money and time to play. This eliminates a good slice of the population from the outset. Add in the fact that most people under 35 are bored stiff by anything that takes two hours, much less four hours, and your flat curve explains itself.
PS. For the record, I agree with Caddyshack’s Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield) that golf courses and cemeteries are the two biggest wastes of prime real estate in the United States.
> More Americans Are Giving Up Golf | N.Y. Times↵