The Golf Watch

What Matt Kenseth and the U.S. Senior Open have in common

Last week, Kenseth's sponsor, DeWalt, announced that it would be ending its sponsorship of the reigning Daytona 500 champ in 2010.  A tough time for parent-company Black and Decker, right?  Well, not so fast.

This week, DeWalt employees/supporters will have another athlete to rally around, a vice president in charge of global engineering who will be wearing the brand and challenging the best over-50 golfers in the world at the U.S. Senior Open.

John Howson (pictured), an amateur and only one of a handful of Europeans in the field this week, will be wearing DeWalt apparel including a polo shirt and hat.  His bag has also been custom-made to have the DeWalt logo.

Who knows how much exposure he is going to get, but his caddie, also a vice president of the company, said that productivity might not be at its highest Thursday and Friday at Black and Decker.

You can read the story I wrote for my newspaper in Baltimore here.

Nevada golf and the legislature are tight

Here in Maryland, we have some important issues to tackle this legislative session.  Slots and the death penalty, for example, are on top of the agenda.  Scouring through the hundreds of bills introduced each year, it's rare to find more than one or two pieces of legislation related to golf.

I bring this up because I was given a tip about the relationship golf plays in Nevada with its state's legislators.

Evidently, the Nevada Golf Industry Alliance recently met with state lawmakers to discuss the positive impact golf has in the state.  Members of the Alliance even took state lawmakers to Duke's Steakhouse at the Casino Fandango.

It's no secret that fewer rounds of golf are being played each year.  Localizing this issue, which Nevada has done, might be step one.

Golf clearly provides an economic boost for the state of Nevada. Shouldn't other state associations, both large and small, promote similar agendas? 

Report: Americans play less in 2008

It's no surprise that the total number of rounds played in the United States dropped so significantly in 2008, but I thought I would link to this report from Golf Inc.  Here's a snippet:

Golf rounds in the United States fell 1.8 percent in 2008 compared to the previous year, according to the year-end National Golf Rounds Played report.

The decline is the largest since 2002 – the year following the 9-11 tragedy – when rounds plummeted 3.0 percent.

Weak December play – with rounds plunging 6.8 percent for the month – ensured that the rounds total would drop for the second consecutive year.

Golf participation dropping nationwide

Mike Dudurich of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review provides these startling statistics from the National Golf Foundation:

• Participation in golf fell from 30 million in 2000 to 26 million in 2005.

• Three million golfers quit playing every year.

• Several hundred of the 3,000 new golf courses built in the United States between 1990 and 2003 have closed.

Truth be told, I was aware of the first and third findings, but not the second one.  Three million?  A scary thought.

Dudrich writes about Get Golf Ready, a nascent group that is attempting to reverse this downward trend...

The newest effort will be rolled out early next year with a low-budget, five-year plan known tentatively as "Get Golf Ready." It will be put in place at 5,000 golf facilities around the country.

The goal of the program is to attract 700,000 new golfers to play 5.7 million rounds over the next five years.

Unlike initiatives aimed at increasing participation among children, Get Golf Ready targets adults who have never played or have limited experience.

Beginners will receive a set of five lessons covering basic skills, rules, etiquette and values for $99.

Geoff Shackelford addresses this steady decline in a recent column in Golfdom.  He believes there are two ways to get golf on the right track--decreasing the time it takes to play a round and having golf executives demonstrate a clear interest in the "going green" movement.

"That man will take home $9 million, with $1 million deferred. Yawn."

I'll admit it, I've been paying more attention to the U.S. Amateur than the opening event of the FedEx Cup playoffs, the Barclays.  I'm sure now that the likes of Jamie Lovemark and Philip Francis have been eliminated I won't be paying as close attention, but still, something has to be said about that.  Cameron Morfit echoes this sentiment on golf.com:

The FedEx Cup is redundant. After 33 tournaments this year, including four majors and three WGC events, we've identified the top players. We know what happens if Sergio Garcia plays Padraig Harrington, and we know that Kenny Perry has had a nice season and could win again...

The U.S. Am is a novelty, a gathering of fantastic players we haven't seen a million times before...

The FedEx Cup is stuck in a major end-of-season traffic jam. All of the individual events anyone cares about are over. In fact, judging from the breathless, parking lot stakeouts of Brett Favre, the press and public tuned out the Tiger-less Tour even during the year's final major. Paddy's PGA was no match for Brett's SUV.

"It’s an archaic format that needs to be changed."

Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate’s 18-hole playoff was about as thrilling as it could get. In my office, several colleagues huddled around a single computer trying to catch the live stream. This became a common sight all over the country.

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But what if Tiger had missed his birdie putt on the closing hole on Sunday, and Westwood had made his?  Would the casual golf fan be interested in a Westwood-Mediate showdown? Mark Cannizzaro of The New York Post said last night on the Grey Goose 19th hole:

I hate to criticize the USGA after it put on such a fantastic US Open this past week, but what I am hoping is that the USGA did not get seduced by this 18-hole playoff to the point where it decides to continue this format. Because it’s an archaic format that needs to be changed.  I hope that the USGA realizes that they got very lucky that Tiger Woods was involved in this thing.

I honestly hope the USGA keeps it going. A major championship of this magnitude should not be decided by three or four holes. The USGA shouldn’t compromise due to television ratings or a lack of Tiger or Phil--and I’m confident they won’t.

Davis changing the U.S. Open for the better

With the appointment of Mike Davis as senior director of Rules and Competitions for the USGA two years ago, a new trend was set for much more forgiving layouts, particularly at this year's U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.  Though the course lacks the history and prestige of Oakmont and Winged Foot, it will provide a fair test, with a different look.  There will be several cuts of rough rather than one, greens won't be running between 14 to 15 on the stimp, and there will be spotty rough, instead of it being consistent and dense.  As Ron Whitten writes in the latest issue of Golf Digest, a new era of the U.S. Open begins now...

But a U.S. Open under Mike Davis isn't about identifying (or rewarding) the biggest bashers in golf.  It's about testing every players' complete game.  He's pretty sure you don't do that by funneling every shot into narrow parameters.  You do it by posing a variety of situations and options that let each golfer play to his strengths when he can--but exercise his imagination when he can't. 

If the U.S. Open is as successful as I think it will be, Davis will breathe new life into the USGA--an organization that is still getting over the debacle of Shinnecock in '04. 

Study shows that more Americans are giving up golf

Paul Vitello of the New York Times writes that fewer Americans are playing golf, according to a recent study by the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.  The total number of people that play golf in a year has dropped from 30 million in 2000, to 26 million.  Vitello writes:

Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession...

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.

The industry now counts its core players as those who golf eight or more times a year. That number, too, has fallen, but more slowly: to 15 million in 2006 from 17.7 million in 2000, according to the National Golf Foundation.

These numbers were released a month after the PGA show, where it was announced that the golf industry is growing and generating more money than ever before.

New anti-doping policy announced

As expected, some of golf's leading organizations including the PGA Tour, USGA, Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and LPGA Tour are backing an anti-doping policy that will begin in 2008. Tim Finchem, who serves as chairman of the World Golf Foundation in addition to his role as commissioner of the PGA Tour, announced a list of banned substances which includes anabolic steroids, hormones, stimulants, narcotics, beta blockers, and masking agents.  Testing is expected to start during the second half of the 2008 season. 

Congressional will not hold US Amateur in '09

According to Leonard Shapiro of The Wasington Post, historic Congressional Country Club, which hosted the inaugural AT&T National last June, will no longer host the 2009 US Amateur golf championship.  Shapiro writes, "Concerns among PGA Tour players and club and USGA officials about the state of Congressional's putting surfaces during the inaugural AT&T National tournament in July prompted the decision. The club plans to redo the greens on its championship Blue course and will begin the work in the summer of 2009, almost two full years before it is scheduled to host the U.S. Open in June 2011." Southern Hills is expected to pick up the US Amateur in 2009.