"... saying it takes too long to play, is too difficult to learn and has too many tiresome rules."
What game are we talking about? Think and take the poll before going here for the source of the quote.
April 19, 2014
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36 comments:
It must be baseball.
It must be baseball.
I knew for sure. Owners are going bankrupt from the overbuilding of the last 20 years.
Without looking at the poll, I said "Monopoly". Not a choice, though. THAT can go on for days. My friend is a real estate agent, and participates in Monopoly competitions. Monopoly has never been played like at those competitions, believe me - establishment of limited partnerships and creative financing and sublets...the mind boggles.
(*comment also posted on comment thread of poll*)
I thought it was acquiring sexual partners and the quote was sourced from Japan. Based on the actual article though, for me, it was cost and time that put the game out of touch for me.
Terra Mystica?
Boardgamers will get the reference.
Golf courses take up vast amount of real estate, often near prime residential areas. Local governments and developers have to be looking at this land and wondering if catering to a sport with dwindling interest reflects the Highest and Best Use (HBU).
That's a huge motivation for golf course owners to keep the sport alive. With dwindling players, club owners don't earn enough revenue to keep their land parked, eventually forcing them to sell. Golf courses end up becoming the next tract of McMansions in your community; and your town's mayor jumps for joy because of all the new tax revenue flowing in.
HBU is a really useful concept.
In my state, Ford and General Motors moved out because their land was more valuable than the factories sitting on top of it. HBU at work.
Sumner Redstone's billions came from his father's large chain of drive-in movie theaters. Over the years, the suburbs encroached. Land values jumped, and the HBU changed to tract housing. The Redstone family cashed out.
It's golf, just as I guessed. The cost is also a significant barrier to entry -- equipment and greens fees are very high. I would love to play more often, but it's tough to justify the cost.
Curtis Strange, quoted in the article, has it right:
“I don’t like any of that stuff. And it’s not going to happen either. It’s all talk.”
I know golf at a public course now takes 5-6 hours. It should take 4 hours tops. Slow play is a major problem on the PGA and it's discouraging amateur golfers as well.
I guessed backgammon.
At 50, I'm not in the demo but - I quit playing golf more than once per year because it's expensive, time consuming and I was never going to get any better. The under 35 set doesn't want to learn the rules? I caddied in the 70's & 80's and the golfers back then ignored them ("winter rules" in June) if they knew them at all.
I read once that in Germany to play golf you have to at least show some competence and get certified. They have many fewer golf courses but the play is better. Now - if I play - it's a work event and with a few exceptions, nearly everyone is terrible and mostly in it for the free beer.
I was going to vote for tennis, a game that has absolutely no joy in the learning process.
Or piano.
Who wants to play a game where the object is to hit a little ball and then chase it?
I wonder how many rare species are threatened by the construction of these environmental horrors.
I don't know that I've ever read a news story about a golf course's construction or use being halted by the discovery of slime worms on the fairways.
I haven't played golf in 10 years or more. I do at times miss it. Chances are I will never play much again. If interest and actual play is falling like the article says, it will be interesting to see how courses that are struggling to stay profitable play out. My guess is that re-development into other land uses, residential, mixed-use (commercial/residential), open space, etc. will be the norm.
Let's just be honest and change the name of the generations from millennials and gen y to whiners and losers, okay. From coddled Baby Boomers to gen z each generation has become more soft, more self-centered, and frankly more unintelligent and reason-deficient all while the accumulation and availability of information and knowledge took the exact opposite trajectory.
The vast majority of any of the above is no match for the charaacter of those of the Greatest Generation that preceded the Baby Boomers. Not a one would have succeeded in the American Revolution or the westward expansion of the United States. If by some miracle America had madeit to the mid 1800's it would have then permanently have divided into 2 countries, one of Slave states and a less powerful one of free states.
We have never been so close to losing every right and freedom enshrined in the Constitution to a government deciding every single aspect of our daily lives than we are at this moment. All because of character and the inability to see beyond our selfish personal needs.
It does take too long. The culture has changed. I don't know many dads who regularly take off on their own all day on the weekend. Families hang out together. I suppose if the kids were old enough, the whole family could go golfing.
Do company executives knock off early and go to the golf courses as often as they used to? That was not uncommon when I was a kid.
Lots of talk about this recently because of the Masters. And then of course, recently people were pissed because Bubba Watson went to the Waffle House to celebrate with family and friends and that wasn't elitist enough for them.
You just can't win these days.
I'm of the "a good walk spoiled" school of thought where golf is concerned.
Frank Thomas, former PGA Technical Director, observed - "When the average golfer hits the sweet spot, it's a mistake."
My banker said, several years ago, the surest way he could get fired was to loan money to a golf course or course developer.
They need to do something.
I'd say, Bridge.
Well golf has some problems but the "rules" aren't the biggest. Hell they are easy enough to get around in a casual game. It's cost and slow play. My 18 yr old daughter doesn't like to watch movies. Standing on the tee box waiting while some idiots play Army golf ("left, right, left, right") doesn't appeal.
And its not "difficult to learn", its difficult to play well, kind of like a piano.
Rules? What rules? Golf is get the ball in the hole. How hard is that to understand?
It's not the rules that are a pain in the ass. It's that damn ball! It won't go where I want it to go. I am your master, you damn little ball. I get mad just thinking about it.
Bridge, on the other hand! I've taken classes on how to play bridge. No idea. Still can't do it. That is a game that is heading for extinction right there.
Also I cannot learn australian rules football, or rugby, or whatever the hell we were playing.
Hitting the ball straight is by far the biggest hurdle when it comes to playing golf. Everything else is secondary. You can always play nine holes if pressed for time.
Does any sport have a bigger environmental impact than golf?
It's elitist. It is environmentally destructive. Uses up often very precious resources (such as water here in California). It is time consuming. It's not family oriented. It's very slow. It's extremely status conscious. Far too many people I know who golf, golf to network or impress people they want to impress.
The few times I've golfed I've enjoyed it. But I've never been tempted to pursue it more.
Fifteen inch holes on the golf course? Soccer balls? Boy, somebody had too many rounds at the Nineteenth hole. Gene Sarazen in the 1930's proposed making the hole bigger and they found out even the pros who couldn't putt well still couldn't putt well. It's not the size of the hole. Golf got a tremendous boost from Tiger Woods and now that his health and his game appears to be fading away, so are his fans. The golfers he drew to the courses sixteen years ago are probably hanging it up now too. This happened before with Bobby Jones and Arnold Palmer. But then again, most people take up golf either because their parents played, or for business reasons. I don't think that will change.
I would expect such a reaction from Curtis Strange, whose commentary skills often drove me to wear out the Mute button. He had nothing to say and said it poorly.
I played competitive tournament golf for many years after picking up the game in my 30's. It is a very difficult game to play proficiently, requiring a commitment in time, effort and dollars.
Clearly, if you expect the annual, monthly or great majority of weekend golfers to play strictly by the rules, you will see 5 and 6 hour rounds. The problem is magnified by the fact that nearly all courses built in the last 30 years were not built with the 100+ shooter in mind, but rather to please the developer selling housing units around the course, leading to too many difficult courses.
I hate to see courses closed or sold off for development, but recognize it as inevitable. The alternative forms of golf proposed may forestall some of these closings.
People under 35 have especially spurned the game...saying it takes too long to play, is too difficult to learn and has too many tiresome rules."
Having spent some time around today's college students, I would have guessed tic-tac-toe.
Golf courses also come under fire for the resources used to maintain all those acres of perfect grass: water + fertilizer. And lots of greenies will never forgive the golf industry for promoting the idea of the perfect green lawn.
The first thing that occurred to me was Monopoly.
There could be any number of reasons why the game would become unpopular among persons of any age - some mentioned in the article and above include cost, time to play, and time to learn.
But one reason that might (might) account for the claim that "people under 35 have especially spurned the game": It is a game where achievement has an objective measure.
Though it masquerades as a competitive game - you go out in groups of 4 and low score wins - it is in fact a sport of individual skill, similar to archery, darts, track, and others, in that there is an objective measurement - time, distance from the target, distance from starting point - that is the true measure of ability.
In golf your achievement - or lack of it - is easily measured and is all yours. You can't blame flaws of your team, or the superiority of the other team. In any individual golf "game" you can blame conditions (the course was too "fast", there was wind, whatever) but averaged over multiple outings your skill is known to all: What's your handicap?
Remember the "self-esteem movement? Competition was bad, and every precious snowflake got an award just for showing up? It can be dated to the 1980s and later. That's your under-35 age group.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it is worth thinking about here.
I am a non-golfer (because I tried it when young and found I was no good at it), but I live in a golf-oriented community. Golf courses are a great asset for a community: They provide open space, and they attract visitors who support local businenesses. Anti-golfers are usually snotty elitists. My brother, a very good amatuer golfer, once invented a device to encourage faster play, but there was no interest in it at the time.
When I was growing up, my father and everyone else played golf. Thursday was the day the doctors played. God help you if you had a medical emergency on a Thursday.
15"?! C'mon, maybe double it, but 15"? Idiotic.
After the PM crowd is teed off, Young men, usually black men, play a 4 some using a cart apiece and each drives to their own ball and hits it as fast as possible and they meet up on the green.
Those groups play twice as fast as the others. We always let them play through...which takes no time at all. Zoom, they are gone.
Oh to be that young again.
Golf is only costly at the ritzy clubs. Most small towns have a municipal course that is inexpensive. My little town has a family membership for about $900 yearly. Everybody plays, young an old. Equipment is/can be cheap. You CAN spend a fortune but you surely don't have to.You can also play in three hours if you just move along.Every hobby/sport can be elitist.
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