Will golf make good on its pandemic mulligan?

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Guy Nicholson is a Toronto writer and publisher of Catalogue 18 magazine.

I’m a middle-aged white man with disposable income and a preternatural ability to make shorts look unstylish. Demographically, that makes me the poster child for Canadian golf – and that’s finally come to be seen as a problem.

As recently as two years ago, golf was wallowing in a long, slow decline. While the game remained Canada’s top participation sport, developers were buying up courses and participation was stagnant or worse. And in a country getting ever more diverse, golf’s customer base and leadership were seen as too old, too white and too male. For many of us who play, that’s been a long-standing embarrassment.

Then COVID-19 came along and threw the game a lifeline. Golf was identified as a safe pandemic outlet for exercise and social activity, and demand for gear and course time surged. Canadians played 9 per cent more rounds in 2020, then 9 per cent more again in 2021. Public players used to booking tee times last-minute suddenly found themselves competing for them. Research conducted for Golf Canada, the game’s governing body, found that two-thirds of the newcomers were women and a similar proportion were in the 18-to-34 age bracket.

It would be easy for the Canadian golf industry to pocket its pandemic bonus and slip back into the old ways. Instead, it should take advantage of the do-over: retain the fresh interest, find more entry points for newcomers, and reverse the long-term trend. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s a key to the game’s economic future.

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Make it more inclusive

For every avid player I know, there’s another person who hates golf with a passion. Sometimes it’s about what happens on the course, but more often it’s about the exclusivity of club culture.

At private clubs, like St. George’s, which hosted last month’s RBC Canadian Open, members pay up front for access to the course, but also to a community. The community can revolve around amenities and services, like a clubhouse, a swimming pool or tennis courts. But historically, it’s also been about discretion over who gets to join.

Discretion can also mean discrimination. At most private clubs, the only true barrier to entry is the ability to pay. But like a book club or a poker club, these golf clubs remain legally free to exclude by race, religion, gender, class, whatever. In Toronto, there were no Jewish golfers at the Rosedale Golf Club until 1997. The National Golf Club of Canada still unapologetically excludes women from membership.

Golf Canada chief executive officer Laurence Applebaum, whose organization’s membership is mostly club-based, took pains in an outreach campaign last year to welcome “new enthusiasts” and “diverse audiences.” But it will still take something dramatic to change public perceptions of private golf. My in-laws still talk about being excluded from a city country club in the 1960s because they were Greek. They were young adults then, but they never considered golf after that. It’s hard to blame them.

That said, the vast majority of Canadian courses aren’t private. They’re public, which means they’re wide open to anyone who calls to book a time. Eighty-four per cent of Canadian golfers play at public facilities. It would be preposterous to say there’s no discrimination on public courses; however, I often play public golf as a single, which means getting inserted into other people’s bookings at random. That makes me a sample size of one, but over the decades, I can think of partners to tick every census box. That’s not my normal experience visiting private clubs.

Another difference is economic. Public courses charge by the game, not by the arm and leg – the course I grew up playing in northwestern Ontario was patronized by a large contingent of railroad workers. It still charges just $25 for a round; juniors play all summer for $105. By contrast, big-city private clubs often charge tens of thousands of dollars to enter, with annual fees to follow. Little wonder public golf has evolved to be more diverse.

So non-golfers aren’t wrong when they note how white the local private club is. But they also may not be noticing how much more inclusive the public course next door is. Public golf should find ways to communicate this – and to lean in with outreach and programs.

RBC and Golf Canada recently joined forces to bring to Canada The First Tee and Youth on Course, two U.S.-based programs designed to foster inclusivity and create affordable golf access for young people. And it is affordable – zero to $5 for green fees and programming, a price point capable of exposing golf to a much wider audience. While writing this story, I came across a clutch of children enrolled at the Chedoke municipal course in Hamilton.

These programs “give many kids who don’t currently have access the opportunity to play golf,” said ambassador Harold Varner III, one of the few Black players playing at golf’s highest level, when he visited Canada for the launch last fall. Mr. Varner knows what he’s talking about – he too grew up playing public golf for $100 a summer. But these efforts will need to be expanded to make a real difference. RBC and Golf Canada expect to reach just 10,000 people at 15 courses by the end of 2023.

Then there is golf’s sexism problem, which is alive and well in both private and public golf. At some clubs, it’s been a long-standing tradition to welcome women as paying members but exclude them from prime tee times. Leering comments to the “cart girl” are common on public courses. These are just two examples of a thread with many strands.

In the 1920s, Ada Mackenzie, one of the finest Canadian golfers of her era, conscripted course designer Stanley Thompson to help her scout for land and open a hassle-free club for women. They eventually settled on a property in Thornhill, Ont., that became the Ladies’ Golf Club of Toronto, which remains a bastion of the women’s game today. Incorrectly, it gets held up as an example of the exclusion it was formed to combat.

Since Ms. Mackenzie’s time, women’s participation has often depended on strong female leadership, supported by men who step up to enable it. But despite golf’s desire to “grow the game,” it isn’t always clear that the men actually want to share.

Tracey Luel, a marketer and entrepreneur who has been running women’s golf initiatives for 25 years, says women are the “missing consumer” – the key to golf’s long-term prosperity. She likes to cite a 2016 study that pegs the global economic value of increased female participation at US$35-billion.

Women have risen to the top echelons of Canadian golf – RBC chief marketing officer Mary DePaoli, National Golf Course Owners Association chief operating officer Nathalie Lavallée and LPGA star Brooke Henderson are among the leaders frequently mentioned. But the game needs to work harder to keep women moving up the entire pipeline. “It’s equal parts exciting and lonely” being one of the few women at the table, Ms. DePaoli said ruefully during a Golf Journalists Association of Canada panel discussion on gender equality I sat in on this spring.

Ms. Luel says half-day clinics aren’t enough to stop attrition; a runway of three years is needed to gain competence and confidence and master the game’s cultural nuances, from etiquette to finding a regular social group. “You have to nurture women who want to reach proficiency, otherwise you lose them,” Ms. Luel says. “It’s a long, slow process. But you get her, her girlfriends and her household. It’s worth it.”

That kind of runway would almost certainly be helpful for all newcomers – BIPOC, LGBTQ, young people of all stripes. To be honest, it also couldn’t hurt for middle-aged white guys who are just taking up golf. But they don’t face the same obstacles, and they aren’t the missing consumer.

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Make it more fun

Golf’s stuffiness and difficulty have always been obstacles. But the culture has become a bit more relaxed in recent years. For example, some shirts are designed to be worn untucked and Bluetooth cart speakers are not the devil’s work. But this is tinkering on the margins. The game is full of arcane etiquette and rules that could be simplified or forgotten. Hat bans in the clubhouse, stroke and distance for a lost ball. As my dad likes to say, why should ball-finding skill determine your score?

But some of the most difficult problems are fundamental to the game itself. Specifically, its difficulty.

Golf-course design and maintenance have long been influenced by how it’s played on the professional tours, which means the most intimidating conditions possible.

Most courses and clubs won’t spend to remove trees, soften hazards and widen fairways to attract a few new players. But as Ladies in Toronto shows, there is a business case for taking demographics into account.

Christine Fraser, a Canadian golf-course designer and a rare woman in her field, calls this “design equity.” She says golf should favour it not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it can attract new golfers and retain them for a lifetime.

“In its simplest form, design equity favours a golf course that provides an interesting, pleasurable and challenging experience,” she told me, “a design where brute force becomes less necessary and a higher demand is put on angles, accuracy and strategy, allowing a wider range of golfers to enjoy the game.”

Ms. Fraser doesn’t just design with women in mind – she has made a niche of advocating for people with adaptive needs, such as people with disabilities and many seniors. It’s forward tees and shorter carries, but also gentler entry points for bunkers, tees and greens. She also flags gender-specific infrastructure labelling and dress codes as cultural issues that need to be updated to include more LGBTQ golfers, though language renovation can be a hard sell at the most hidebound clubs. (For example, forward tees is the preferred term, but lots of clubs still say ladies’ tees on scorecards and literature.)

Ms. Fraser was involved in a women-focused renovation at the private Beaconsfield Golf Club in Montreal, but she says retail-friendly public courses tend to be more receptive to design equity. She points to Pitchin Golf, an Australian effort to build a purpose-built golf facility offering training and employment for people with intellectual disabilities, and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club’s plan for a family-focused golf facility in Glasgow, Scotland. She also praises Toronto’s municipal courses and Cabot Cape Breton, a resort in Inverness, N.S., as Canadian leaders in this space.

Cabot instituted an aggressive and thoughtful forward-tee program for its two full-length courses, both ranked among the top public courses in Canada, in order to court players who want the same resort experience with a more tailored level of challenge. Guests can choose a set of forward tees that reduce the 6,840-yard Links course to as little as 3,540 yards. And during the pandemic, the resort opened a 10-hole short course meant to be played in a fraction of the four to five hours a full round might take. The entire course is 705 yards from the forward tees – pros on the Korn Ferry Tour played a single hole that surpassed that in 2020.

The common theme is that the game can’t just wait for non-golfers to arrive, and it can’t just assume that those who do will stick. These are changes everyone in Canadian golf should reckon with pro-actively.

And that includes the people who write about it. It would be refreshing to see future essays on this topic written by someone who isn’t white, male and of a certain age. Unsurprisingly, the large majority of people who write about Canadian golf are.

Golf Journalists Association of Canada president Rick Young isn’t waiting for the problem to fix itself. Since taking office, Mr. Young has rewritten GJAC’s mandate to try and encourage all writers to celebrate equity, diversity and inclusiveness in their stories and in the industry. He says changing how we talk is part of what it will take to make golf thrive beyond the pandemic.

“The ‘rich white man’s game’ stereotype about Canadian golf is a falsehood, but that perception is pervasive,” he told me. “To be a welcoming sport requires written and spoken words that reflect that.” When people of diverse backgrounds read and hear golf stories that are inclusive, it breaks down a barrier to entry and it can be seen as an invitation to try the game.

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