News

I've made some friends in certain segments of the golf industry over the years, but I expect I won't see some of them much after this column runs ... unless I happen to catch them in the act as they egg my house or let the air out of my tires.

That's because in the spirit of dogged investigative journalism and fearless truth-telling, I am here to say that golfers are a herd of suckers. Year in and year out, we fall prey to the same kind of self-improvement marketing that drives fad diets, absurd fashions and surgical enhancements. Why do we succumb? To make us feel better about ourselves, I suppose. Although, like fad diets, it almost never works.

I'm talking about golf gear, or, more specifically, the golfer's obsession with getting their hands on as much new and fancy equipment as they can possibly afford. It's all a bit mystifying to me. According to a 2006 Royal Canadian Golf Association survey, this country's six million golfers spend $2.25-billion a year on equipment, or about $375 each. We think the latest clubs will help because the pros on TV promise they'll help, the sales people at the store guarantee they'll help, they look so new sitting on the shelf ... but then we get to the course and our score still sucks.

Take my brother. He's a pretty decent player, but he's also a product magpie, always winging over to the shiniest new piece of equipment. Only problem is, his game isn't any better than it was a few thousand dollars ago. His golf-related sentences begin with, "I just don't understand why my driving/chipping/putting isn't better." The inverse is my father-in-law, who buys knockoffs at the flea market for forty bucks and just won his club's senior championship.

My brother, along with millions of other golfers, would love the annual PGA Merchandise Show, an orgy of technology that provides us with higher moments of inertia, Nanofuse shafts, Complete Inertial Design drivers, tungsten inserts and a thousand more non-innovative innovations. A law professor friend tells me that there are more patents taken out every year for golf equipment than for any other sport.

To be fair, there have been genuine advances in the past couple of decades that make the game easier for all levels of players, things such as cavity back irons and, especially, hybrid clubs (because, as Lee Trevino once quipped, even God couldn't hit a 1-iron). And don't get me wrong, picking a shiny new driver or a sleek iron off the store shelf is not unpleasant. I admire the craftsmanship. I appreciate the combination of functionality and aesthetic flow. I just don't think caving in to the industry's relentless new product cycle is likely to help my score.

Ten years ago, I joined some friends on a trip through southwestern England to play gems such as Saunton and Royal North Devon. I didn't have my clubs with me, so I was forced to rely on rentals and borrowed sets.

We played seven rounds of golf during which I used seven different sets of clubs. They varied from a brand new set of Pings all the way down to a crusty canvas bag holding a half set of rusty pre-Second World War junkers. I played okay with the Pings and I played okay with the junkers. There was an eight-shot variation in my seven scores. When I got home, there was the exact same eight-shot variation in the next seven rounds I played with my own clubs.

Meeting the ball in the middle of the clubface will produce a good golf shot whether you're using a 2008 Callaway or a 1972 Kmart Blue Ridge (my first set of clubs).

The real snow job is the golf ball. We're led to believe it goes straighter and farther than ever. Well, that depends who's doing the swinging. As with most equipment, the real advantages of high-end balls fall to those players who achieve a certain clubhead speed and consistent swing path. If you can't generate, say, 80 per cent of what the pros do achieve, then there's no point spending money on balls such as the Titleist Pro V1 or the Nike One Platinum or the new TaylorMade ball. If you can't break 85, you shouldn't be spending $5 for a ball that you're not going to benefit from and, more importantly, that won't stand up to three holes' worth of the abuse to which you're likely to subject it.

All this speaks to what seems to me to be the double-edged irony of the golf equipment industry; the better a player you are, the better able you are to score well with almost any club, yet the majority of the really great advances in equipment - such as with the shaft and the ball - can only be fully maximized by the best players. How's that for fair?

So stick with the basics. Get some cavity back irons off eBay, grab a couple of last year's hybrid clubs off the pro shop's demo rack and throw a dozen mid-priced balls in your bag. Add a couple of lessons on grip and alignment, and you're good to go. There's not much more you'll need to enjoy the game, which, it may surprise you, is the point of golf.

I know you're not listening, though. People are still going to drop $900 on a new set of clubs and they're still going to shoot 100. Why do we do this? At the obvious level, many golfers have the money to spend, so they spend it. But I also think it goes beyond that.

Golfers are, deep down, optimists. We value the possible over the probable, and although golf is a maddening and unknowable game, it's also pretty damn exciting when something good happens. That's why we spend all that money on equipment; it speaks to the promise of the next shot, of something exhilarating taking place. Sure, those moments are rare, but they do happen. And maybe I can make more of them happen with sparkly new equipment. Right?

Like I said. Bunch of suckers.

Curtis Gillespie is the author of Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links along the Scottish Coast. His most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.