The Week That Was, august 31, 2014

     It’s time for all of us who have a stake in amateur golf to wash our hands of professional golf.
     For decades, the world’s professional golf tours have asked much of amateur golf. They want us to buy tickets to their overpriced events, so they can tout their attendance figures. They want us to tune into their television broadcasts, so they can squeeze more money out of the networks at contract time. They want us to support their advertisers, so they can persuade corporations on the sidelines to get in on the action. And most of all, they want us to genuflect before their power, to certify their importance in the wide world of sports.
     Today, as amateur golf -- the largest part of the golf industry -- shows the big love to the upper crust, what do we get in return?
     In a word: Disdain.
     Professional golf doesn’t really give a damn about amateur golf. To be sure, the leaders of the tours may occasionally pay lip service to our needs, in particular the need to grow the game. They may even throw a little money our way every once in a while, although nowadays they prefer do it in foreign nations -- China and India, for instance -- that they view as markets ripe for commercial exploitation.
     In a recent story about the economic health of the golf industry, the Financial Times concluded that the professional golf tours are, ultimately, “more interested in amateurs watching the game on TV rather than playing it.”
     The Times even got an official from one of the golf tours to make a brutally honest appraisal of amateur golf’s importance in the grand scheme of things. “Is participation critical?” the official asked rhetorically, answering the question this way: “To manufacturers and golf courses, but not to us.”
     The statement is as pure a distillation of professional golf’s disregard for amateur golf as one could ever find. Those who believe that amateur and professional golf share the same goals and values are sadly mistaken. They feed off us. We get the scraps off their table.
     Through the hardest times of the Great Recession, the most powerful institutions in our industry carefully tended to the needs of professional golf, which today thrives as it never did before. As for amateur golf, it was allowed to wither.
     Golf’s participation rates aren’t falling in a vacuum. We’re all seeing and feeling numerous ripple effects and consequences: An exodus of club members, an endless parade of courses going out of business, the end of golf development, architects and construction companies suffering, a decline in sales of apparel and equipment, and other discouraging news.
     When a tour official acknowledges that participation -- the lifeblood of the golf industry -- doesn’t concern him, it should be evident that the two worlds of golf have begun to work at cross-purposes. The one hand no longer washes the other. And that means our business is a lot dirtier than it used to be.

     A group led by Phil Mickelson and Doug Manchester, the publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, is looking to buy Fairbanks Ranch Country Club in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The 30-year-old club, located on city-owned property, features a 27-hole, Ted Robinson-designed golf complex and serves as the centerpiece of a private community that’s reportedly home to “the most prominent business, professional, and social personalities” in the San Diego area. The club’s roughly 400 members had considered selling their property to ClubCorp but felt that Mickelson and Manchester would invest more into club improvements. In recent years Mickelson has become an active purchaser of golf properties, but Fairbanks Ranch would be his first purchase in California. He and Steve Loy, his business partner and agent, own five courses in Arizona, among them McDowell Mountain Golf Club in Scottsdale, Palm Valley Golf Club in Goodyear, and The Golf Club at Chaparral Pines in Payson. One last thing: Earlier this year, Fairbanks Ranch was reportedly having problems with coots, and not just the old ones in the clubhouse.

     An accident has claimed the life of Mark Amundson, who leaves a legacy that will enrich American golf for generations: Sutton Bay Club in Agar, South Dakota. The club’s Graham Marsh-designed track, a minimalist fantasy come to life, was recognized by Golf Digest as the nation’s best private course in 2004. “Many of us have dreams, and he’s one of the few who made his dream happen,” one of Amundson’s fellow investors at Sutton Bay told the Argus Leader. “Because of him, we have something that’s a national treasure, in my opinion.” Amundson died late last Sunday night, after the ATV he was driving rolled over. He was 55.

     KemperSports has assumed management of a golf club famous for its strict, rigorously enforced dress code. The Northbrook, Illinois-based firm now has an opportunity to effect policy at La Gorce Country Club, a member-owned venue in Miami Beach, Florida that dates to the late 1920s. La Gorce likes to brag about the famous athletes who used to be members -- Joe DiMaggio, Jack Dempsey, Babe Zaharias -- but it made an international spectacle of itself in late 2012, when it booted another sports star, Michael Jordan, off of its Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course. Jordan’s offense: He was wearing cargo pants. When he refused to change into slacks acceptable to the membership, he was reportedly told to get out and stay out. “We look forward to developing programs with the membership to enhance the experience for members and their guests as the club writes the next chapter in its remarkable history,” KemperSports said in a press release. Is there a chance of the next chapter including a few concessions to modernity?