The other week I was invited by an acquaintance to play golf at Whitekirk, a relatively new and hilly course several miles from the East Lothian coastline. Unfortunately I’d misheard his invitation and instead waited more than half an hour for him at Winterfield, an older and much shorter course by the sea in my own town of Dunbar. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late to meet up, although in truth I didn’t mind: the air was cold and the wind was howling, and the older I get, the less inclined I am toward golfing masochism.
I’ve been to Whitekirk many times. I won an open competition there several years ago, and I like taking my kids for hits and giggles at its practice range. Its restaurant does a good carvery lunch on Sundays, and its large clubhouse also contains a swimming pool and a state-of-the-art gym. But I rarely see many people there: let’s just say memberships and tee times at Whitekirk are both freely available. And whenever I hear stories that golf is becoming less popular and the golf industry is in trouble, Whitekirk is one of the first places I think about.
Tales of golf’s decline are becoming increasingly commonplace – one recent data point being a report by Sport England that the number of regular golfers between the ages of 16 and 25 in England dropped by nearly 50% between 2009-10 and 2012-13. Suggested reasons for this include the increasing cost of the game, the amount of time it takes to play 18 holes, and even the waning status of Tiger Woods. The rise of activities like TopGolf and FootGolf indicate that people still like hitting balls with sticks and wandering purposely through nature with a scorecard and pencil, but both at the same time? Maybe not so much.
None of this bothers me. Market forces should work against difficult, gorse-lined, hard-to-walk courses on iffy soil with overly expansive clubhouses like Whitekirk. If clubs are forced to save money by not over-watering their courses, moving away from the lush and green Augusta-centric model toward browner, firmer and more natural conditions, that’s a good thing. If fewer people deign to play the game while these natural corrections begin to take effect, well, that means more tee times, faster rounds and better deals should be available for the rest of us.
What golf needs is more courses like Winterfield. Its par is 65, its maximum length is just over 5,000 yards, and even if most of its front nine is pancake flat, its back nine has enough lovely views and interesting holes to un-spoil your walk. It lets you make birdies, but its small greens are easy to miss, and because the average golfer spends much more time reading putts than analyzing chips and pitches, small greens make the pace of play that much faster.
Too many venerable clubs lengthen and toughen their courses to keep up with some mythical, platonic ideal that real golf courses should be more than 7,000 yards and must be more than 6,000 yards. Hogwash: the steady stream of regulars I saw that morning trooping through the Winterfield car park, into and out of the ramshackle clubhouse and onto the first tee to brave the elements proves that. I hope my kids become golfers like me some day, and courses like Winterfield – not courses like Whitekirk – make that much more likely.