The NGF: 'A Course a Day,' Then & Now

In a recent post, I characterized the National Golf Foundation as being "often unreliable" -- a turn of phrase that appears to have touched a raw nerve at the Jupiter, Florida-based trade group.

Shortly after the post was published, I received a condescending e-mail from one of the group's vice presidents. (I guess my offense didn't merit a response from the president himself.) My aggrieved correspondent delivered a stern warning -- he said that he takes "that type of accusation very seriously" -- and noted that he and his colleagues "hold ourselves to a high standard with regard to the veracity and integrity of our research."

And, predictably, he called my characterization "irresponsible."

I'm thinking that maybe my correspondent is expecting an apology. If that's the case, he's going to be disappointed.

Instead, I'm going to talk about a far more serious example of irresponsibility, one that has put hundreds of golf courses out of business and hundreds more on the endangered list. These course closings can be traced, I believe, to a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided course-construction campaign that has all but destroyed the development side of the U.S. golf industry.

As many of you have already guessed, I'm going to write about four little words that the NGF has made infamous: "A course a day."

In the late 1980s, the NGF's savvy researchers examined stacks of demographic data and concluded that the United States didn't have enough golf courses to accommodate the large number of Baby Boomers who'd start playing golf as they moved toward retirement. Supply and demand -- or at least expected demand -- weren't singing in perfect harmony, the NGF decided.

So the NGF teamed up with a marketing company to create and promote a "strategic plan" whose aim was to build thousands of golf courses. The NGF gathered industry leaders for a series of golf "summits," and it spread the news about its overly optimistic research to all who'd listen.

The centerpiece of the plan was a call to open "a course a day" through the year 2000. It was a daunting challenge, to be sure, but not, we were assured, a reckless one.

Heck, the NGF's research supported it.

As the NGF hoped, its credo sparked a frenzy of construction. The nation's developers, bless their greedy little hearts, began building golf courses as if America's appetite for the game was insatiable. By the time they'd spent all their bankers' money, they'd opened something like 3,500 or 4,000 new golf courses. In some years during the 1990s, they even exceeded the NGF's wish and opened more than a course a day.

The construction boom of the 1990s was among history's greatest examples of American enterprise at work. Our industry's achievement was borderline heroic -- our version of putting a man on the moon. Armed with the gospel according to the NGF, we came, we saw, and we conquered. Fortunes were made, new frontiers were explored, and the gravy train rolled across the nation, from Myrtle Beach to Palm Springs.

Unfortunately, there would soon be blood on the tracks. By the mid 1990s, it became apparent that those aging Baby Boomers weren't playing nearly as much golf as the NGF predicted they would. Much to our dismay, the number of rounds played in the United States began to fall, not rise. An ever-larger number of golf courses were forced to battle for an ever-smaller number of golfers.

By the end of the 1990s, if not before, it was clear that the U.S. golf industry had built too many courses. As a result of the race to build "a course a day," the industry got stuck in a sinkhole of decline that it hasn't been able to climb out of.

For this, you can thank the NGF. The people who call me irresponsible.

So who do you think the NGF blames for the mess? Its vaunted research? Its over-hyped exuberance?

Not a chance. In 2004, in an interview with Sports Illustrated, the NGF's president blamed the over-building on developers.

"What no one remembers," said Joe Beditz, "is that 10 years later, in 1999, we issued a second report saying our assumption of 3 to 4 percent growth wasn't happening. . . . We said, 'Stop!' But the developers went ahead and built another 1,500 courses anyway. They saw gold in them thar fairways. Instead of a golf boom we had a construction boom, and everyone built in the same markets at the same price points. . . . People built irrationally, and now they're blaming us."

Ignore the feigned surprise and the phony suffering. The blame was not misplaced.

And while we're on the subject, can someone tell me why it took the NGF a decade to discover its error? By that time, the damage was mostly done.

To be fair, the drive to build "a course a day" had many beneficial effects on golf. It drew lots of media attention to the game, gave it sizzle, and spread its appeal not just from coast to coast but across the entire planet. People started to put the words golf and cool in the same sentence.

What's more, I know that the NGF thought it was doing a good thing. It intended to grow the business, not destroy it. But today, it's apparent that the idea of building "a course a day" was a ticking time bomb. The NGF's research, the foundation of the construction program, simply didn't pan out. There was, ultimately, not nearly as much gold in them thar fairways as the NGF said there would be.

Today, the bleeding continues. Let's take a quick look at the current golf landscape, with statistics courtesy of the NGF:

-- In 2003, there were 30.6 million U.S. golfers. Today there are 27.1 million.

-- In 1990, 12.1 percent of the U.S. population played golf. By 2000, the number had fallen to 11.1 percent, and in 2008 it was down to 10.2 percent.

-- In 2001, 518 million rounds of golf were played in the United States. In 2008, 489 million were played.

-- In 1988, our nation had 4,900 private clubs with 3 million members. Today it has 4,400 clubs with 2.1 million members.

-- In the 1990s, we had something like 16,000 public golf properties. Today we have 11,600.

The numbers tell a grim story: The U.S. golf business has been shrinking not just since the market crash of 2008, but for more than a decade. Slowly but surely, things have been getting worse for many years. And every one of us, each in our own way, is paying for the delirium of "a course a day."

So what does the NGF say about the golf industry today, just two decades after it put us on a construction spree?

It says that we need to un-do what we've done. To narrow the gap between supply and demand, it says that we need to close between 1,500 and 2,000 golf courses. This, it promises, will make everything better.

In other words, we need to close a course a day for the next five years!

Has a familiar ring, doesn't it?

"This is not necessarily a bad thing for owners and operators as a whole," Beditz wrote in "The Future of Public Golf in America," a report published by the NGF this year.

The sentiment may be true, but let me note that going out of business is nearly always a very bad thing for the individual people who actually go out of business. I sure hope that the NGF hasn't forgotten the fundamental truth about statistics: the numbers represent real-life people.

The NGF's new, upside-down version of "a course a day" begs an obvious question that the NGF needs to answer: Are you sure you've got it right this time?

Because much is at stake. And not everyone is sold on the notion that a tidal wave of golf-course closings will solve the industry's problems.

"Some industry pundits wistfully believe that golf's health crisis is no more than a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, and that it will heal naturally once the game sheds some 1,500 to 2,000 golf courses," David Hueber wrote in an article for the Journal of Sustainable Real Estate. "However, that laissez-faire attitude leads to an unmanaged outcome, and the root causes for the industry's chronic condition will persist if it is not diagnosed and left untreated."

Hueber's name may be familiar to some of you. In the 1980s, he was the NGF's president.

Later in his essay, Hueber writes: Theoretically, having fewer golf courses and maintaining the same number of golf rounds played on a national basis would provide more business for the remaining golf courses. However, there is no guarantee that this cure will work. . . . It is difficult to determine what closures in what locations would bring the demand and supply into balance.

Let me add my two-cents' worth, because there's a sub-text to the NGF's current message that frightens me. The NGF says that the nation's most at-risk facilities -- the ones most likely to close -- are older nine-hole courses, par-3 and executive-length 18-hole tracks, and courses that offer cheap greens fees.

It just so happens that these are the places that typically give birth to and nurture new golfers. If we lose 2,000 of these "affordable" golf courses, where will we be five, 10, or 20 years from now, when our industry is disproportionately stocked with private tracks and $75- to $100-a-round daily-fee layouts? Where will beginners learn to play? Where will the nation's First Tee programs establish themselves?

And what about seniors and blue-collar golfers? Where will they play when affordable courses disappear?

How does the NGF propose to grow the game without a critical mass of low-cost, low-pressure venues? Why does it presume that the rounds currently being played on low-priced courses will simply transfer to more expensive tracks?

Personally, I don't think it's going to happen. I fear that the number of U.S. golfers will simply continue to shrink, due to the high cost of entry. Which means that things will just keep getting worse.

I'll be honest: Thinking about stuff like this makes my head spin. I'd leave it to the experts, if I trusted them.

Many years ago, when I was the managing editor of a business magazine, I learned that you can tell a lot about an organization's values, loyalties, and ambitions simply by examining its board of directors. So here are the companies on the NGF's board: Callaway Golf, Footjoy, TaylorMade, Toro, Golf Pride, the Golf Channel, Edwin Watts Golf, Billy Casper Golf, and my favorite, Textron Financial, a company that isn't even in the golf lending business anymore.

Does anyone out there think that the NGF's board is an accurate reflection of the golf business?

Where are the small companies? The golf-course owners? The design firms and construction companies -- or, for that matter, anyone associated with the development side of the business? Don't any of them deserve a seat at golf's main table?

If you're wondering who the NGF really works for, who it really represents, scan that list of its board members again. The NGF listens closest to our industry's biggest, richest, and most powerful companies. Nobody else.

The NGF doesn't care about a sole proprietor like me or about any of the mom-and-pop companies that are trying to eke out a living in our mess of an industry. It doesn't care about any of the course designers and builders who are starving for work or who've already lost their jobs.

And most assuredly, the NGF doesn't care about the owners of the 1,500 to 2,000 golf facilities that it says must soon go out of business. Make no mistake, the NGF has sold them down the river. It's decided that the golf industry can't get healthy until they die. Today it's promoting their demise, just as it once promoted an irresponsible construction program. They are among the sacrifices that must be made to atone for the sin of building "a course a day."

When I started writing this blog, I was wondering if the NGF was expecting me to make an apology. Now I'm thinking that everyone who still works in golf deserves a long-overdue apology from the NGF.