worth reading From Bad To Worse

In the newspaper business, there's nothing quite like kicking an industry when it's down. Of course, it hurts a little when it's your industry that's getting kicked.

The latest newspaper writer to do a-bruisin' on golf is Jon Swartz of USA Today, who contends, in a story called "Golf Clubs Suffer in Recession as Membership Dwindles," that "the business of golf faces an economic outlook that is sinking like a downhill putt."

Oh, those clever newspaper writers! They really known how to turn a phrase!

To be fair, Swartz has the broad outlines of the story right. Golf's popularity, as he notes, has been in a slow but steady decline pretty much since the bombing of the World Trade Center.

And Swartz knows why.

"Most people just can't afford the luxury of a $100 to $400 round of golf," he writes, although he could have mentioned that the vast majority of golf courses charge less. He's also on target when he notes that "businesses are cutting back on golf-related expenses for executives," although that's been happening for the better part of a decade, and that "travelers who once plunked down gobs of cash to golf in exotic locales are passing up golf vacations."

Actually, those "exotic locales" started seeing fewer customers right after 9/11, when most everyone in America became afraid to get on an airplane. Although the resort business has improved over the years, it's never fully recovered.

From there, Swartz lays a few demoralizing facts on the table. Among them:

-- The total number of memberships at private clubs currently stands at 2.1 million, 900,000 below the number recorded when the business peaked in the early 1990s.

-- Citing a statistic provided by Jim Koppenhaver of Pellucid, Swartz notes that private clubs in the United States lost between 5 percent and 15 percent of their members last year. The losses cost the average club $187,000 in dues. Even worse, Koppenhaver believes that as many as 1,000 private clubs must close, convert to public play, or merge with healthier clubs before "some semblance of balance returns to the private club market."

-- The number of golfers in the United States has fallen to 27.1 million, according to the often unreliable National Golf Foundation, down from 30 million in 2005.

-- So far this year, rounds played at U.S. golf courses are down 3 percent, according to Golf Datatech.

Nothing like a few kicks in the teeth to get a golf executive moving in the morning!

It should be noted, however, that some of the "evidence" Swartz uses to support his arguments -- particularly the anecdotes he uses to add color to his story -- is specious. I don't know why, for example, Swartz starts with a report about a consultant from California who quit his club in New Jersey, as if that's supposed to illustrate a typical problem that private clubs face these days. Are clubs in the Northeast full of dues-paying members from the Left Coast?

And what's the point of telling us about the young woman in Los Angeles who didn't take up golf because the price of a local club membership -- said to be $100,000 a year -- was too expensive? Couldn't anybody in Southern California suggest some alternatives for this directionless young woman, like maybe learning to play at one of the area's many municipal courses or joining a somewhat less pricey club?

You can read the story for yourself by clicking on this phrase.