The Week That Was, december 21, 2014

     When President Obama decided to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba, you can bet that he caught the attention of our nation’s golf-course developers, architects, and builders. For more than 50 years, Cuba has tantalized the entire U.S. golf industry, for it teems with first-rate opportunities for golf development. The question was never whether the sport might take hold in the island nation, but rather how many courses the world’s vacationers and itinerant golfers might comfortably support. Sometimes the possibilities seemed almost endless. And yet, as development groups from Canada, Great Britain, Spain, and other nations have discovered, Cuba has never delivered on its promise. Not a single course has been built there for close to 20 years, thanks largely to the island nation’s misbegotten distrust of anything that smacks of capitalism. The stumbling block to golf development in Cuba has never been an American president, a reluctant Congress, or memories of the missile crisis. All along, the problem has been Cuba’s dysfunctional government. Until it loosens the shackles of socialism, Cuba will remain what it is today: So close and yet so far away.

     All of this week’s talk about Cuba reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Mike Keiser. More than a decade ago, while serving as a consultant to a Canadian group, the famed developer of naturalist golf resorts such as Bandon Dunes in Oregon, Cabot Links in Nova Scotia, and Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania sized up several potential sites in Cuba and returned home thinking that the island nation has the potential to be the equal of any golf destination in the Caribbean. “If it ever becomes a free-market spot,” he told me, “Cuba will be full of golf.” Keiser estimates that the island can support as many as 20 courses.

     A year’s end is a time for taking stock, and the initial reports concerning the current state of U.S. golf are discouraging. As most everyone knows, 157.5 U.S. golf courses closed last year, and while the data for 2014 hasn’t yet been released, it’s safe to assume our nation will post a ninth consecutive year in which closings exceed openings. So although readers of this blog certainly don’t need it, here’s a lump of coal for your Christmas stocking: The Economist reports that Steve Skinner of Kemper Sports, a man who undoubtedly has his finger on the pulse of U.S. golf operations, thinks it’s going to take “another 10 years to level the imbalance between supply and demand.” While you contemplate the implications of Skinner’s statement, remember this: ’Tis the season to be jolly.

     You think the news from the United States is bad? The Australian Financial Review thinks that Australia’s golf industry “may be facing an existential crisis” and “may be running out of time” to fix itself. Using data provided by Golf Australia, AFR has compiled a list of what it describes as “damning figures” to support its claims, a list too long to catalog in a single post. But here’s the worst of it: While golf participation rates among people who are 65 and older are holding steady, since 2000 the nation’s overall golf participation rate has dropped by 11 percent. The drain is flowing greatest among people aged between 15 and 24, a bracket whose participation rates since 2000 have fallen from 6 percent to 2 percent. Justifiably, AFR calls this problem “a looming demographic crunch” and predicts that “this missing junior generation will eventually become a missing middle-aged generation.”

     Continuing in this vein may ruin some holidays, but I can’t resist: The people who oversee amateur golf in England fear that the nation’s golf clubs are, economically speaking, in “a precarious position,” in part because they’re doing a lousy job of attracting women. A recent survey of 709 English golf clubs, conducted by Sports Marketing Surveys for England Golf, has determined that the average club nowadays has 499 members, the overwhelming majority (77 percent) of them white men. Women, a group that’s often said to be a potentially prime market for golf, account for only about 15 percent of the clubs’ membership. What’s worse, the ratio of men to women at the nation’s clubs “has remained almost identical since England Golf first started researching it in 2002,” according to Golf Club Management. Translation: No progress for 12 years. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

     Citing “substantial operating losses and cash-flow deficits,” the entity that owns one of the biggest and best-known four-season resorts in the Midwest has filed for bankruptcy protection. Treetops Resort & Spa, a 4,000-acre spread in Gaylord, Michigan, features a ski area, a hotel with a conference center, four 18-hole golf courses (among them tracks by Robert Trent Jones and Tom Fazio), and a nine-hole, par-3 layout. Treetops Acquisition Company LLC, which bought the property in 2002, has boosted the revenues generated by the resort’s hotel and golf operations in recent years but sought financial relief because it’s being suffocated by $7 million in long-term debt. The resort’s general manager told the Gaylord Herald Times that the filing “sets us up for the future” and that “everything is going to be fine.” He believes Treetops can exit Chapter 11 early next year.