GolfStinks

A Golf Blog for the Rest of Us!

In the Time of PED’s, How Has Golf Stayed Clean?

| By | Leave a Comment

Me and one of my boys were feeling a little under the weather this past Sunday afternoon.  So even though it’s a beautiful day, we’re just hanging out on the sofa scanning the channels.  I’m hoping we land on some type of a sporting event.  Well, in actuality, I’m just hoping we land on something other than Power Rangers.  But with the remote in his hand…who knows what we’ll end up watching.  There’s a good chance I’ll end up watching the back of my eyelids.  But lo and behold, he heads to one of the ESPN’s and says “We could watch high school football.”

So at first, I’m partially satisfied.  I mean, even though it’s high school, it’s still football.  But after I thought about it further, I began to wonder why the heck we are watching high school football on a nationally televised cable network.  A local cable access channel?  OK.  But, being that I’m in Connecticut and watching two teams from Florida on an ESPN channel?  What’s going on?!

Then, this just gets me thinking deeper into youth sports on television.  We have high school football being nationally televised.  High school basketball, and McDonald’s All-America games are nationally televised as well.  And in baseball, we go even further past high school, as every year we are nationally televising little league games!!  I can’t be the only person that sees the problem with this.  What problem?  Over-exposure, that’s the problem.

I could be wrong, but in my opinion, over-exposure is where all of the problems with PED’s in sports begins.  When the extra spotlight is put on players who are too young to handle or understand it, pressure is then created at an earlier age.  This pressure to perform in front of cameras on a national stage creates further pressure to perform at a greater level than they can naturally.  Athletes now feel the pressure at an earlier age to be bigger, faster and stronger than their peers.  Enter PED’s.

Thankfully, as far as we know anyway, the PED problem has not yet come to the world of golf – though we have questioned the possibility.  And maybe a part of the reason for that is, no one cares about amateur golf.  Well, not enough to nationally televise high school golf tournaments anyway.  But if it came to that point, do you think for a second the pressure wouldn’t reach those kids as well?  Sure, extra strength from PED’s would, for the most part, only benefit a golfer off the tee.  So it wouldn’t really help the all-around game.  But when a few 17-year old high school seniors are on ESPN ripping 300+ yard drives on a regular basis while reps from Callaway, Nike and Adidas are watching…well…I think you see what I mean.

So after all of these thoughts run through my head, I ended up changing the channel to something else.  I just don’t like the idea of over-exposing and promoting kids, who are at an age when they should be playing these sports for fun more than anything else, and I don’t want to help promote/support it.  We see what it’s doing to baseball.  It’s happening in football as well, although to a far smaller degree.  And it’s probably only a matter of time before it finds its way into basketball too.  So as long as we keep from putting high school golf on TV, maybe that can be one way to help keep the sport clean.

Swing ’til you’re happy!

The Gluttony of Golf

| By | 5 Comments

Did we overdo it with the number of courses? (photo by Gabriel S. Delgado C. / CC BY 2.0)
Is this word overstuffed with golf courses? (photo by
Gabriel S. Delgado C. / CC BY 2.0)

Do you have any idea how many golf courses are in the United States? You can find out easily – just conduct a simple search on our courses and golfers page.

If you only select “USA” as your country and hit search, you will get 725 pages worth of courses with 25 courses per page. Some quick math will tell you that adds up to 18,125 golf courses in the US.

Do you have any idea how big that number is? Well, let me help put it in perspective for you: How long will you drive down the main drag of any city or town in America before you pass a McDonlad’s? Not very long, right? Well, there are only 12,804 Mickey D’s in the United States.

Does that help you wrap your head around 18 thousand f’ing golf courses? Let me ask you something else: What the hell is this country doing with 18,000 golf courses? There’s only 50 states for goodness sake! That’s nearly 400 courses per state! I can understand a state the size of Texas having hundreds of courses (actually has 940), but why does my pea-sized home state of Connecticut have hundreds (199 to be exact)?

The way I see it, having this many golf courses poses a couple problems: First, there’s the negative environmental impact. In the U.S. (which is home to more than half the world’s courses), golf is played on nearly 2 million acres of land. That land requires more than 2 billion* gallons of water daily to be kept green. In addition, vast tracts of natural habitats are being displaced.

In Wyoming in 2004, for example, bald eagles in the region were driven from their nests to accommodate a new golf course just outside of Jackson Hole – an area already established as a golfing mecca.

But giving the middle finger to wildlife is only part of golf’s environmental problem – every year, millions of pounds of pesticides are used on courses in the US. And there’s runoff of those chemicals into our rivers and streams – water that will eventually contaminate wildlife, plant life, and human life.

If this wasn’t bad enough – let’s look at the second problem I have with America’s overabundance of golf courses: It simply isn’t good for the game. The reality is (to quote a post I wrote over a year ago) “every year since 2006, more golf courses have closed in the U.S. than have opened.”

We over-did-it. A decade ago, new courses were springing up everywhere. Now, they’re closing – And struggling private courses are opening their doors to the public in an effort to stay afloat.

Cost-saving measures include squeezing in as many tee-times as possible and trimming staff (course rangers in particular). Both of the aforementioned steps have contributed to slow play (a turn-off for both new and established golfers alike).

Look, I love golf (if you’ve read this blog before, I think it’s obvious) – but don’t you think 18,000 courses is spreading this game a little thin? In this post-Tiger era (and let’s face it, it’s definitley post-Tiger), interest in the game has waned somewhat – we can no longer afford to maintain (successfully anyway) all these tracts of land.

Perhaps a small downsize would be good for golf. Lord knows if our gluttony continues…”Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.” – Proverbs 23:20-21.

*Corrected Figure (this post originally stated 4 billion gallons of water per day).

Oh No! I’ve Lost My Golf Hook-Up!

| By | 1 Comment

Doesn’t everyone just love that guy/girl that’s got your hook-up? You know, the one who can get you something from somewhere for free or cheap? Maybe it was something that…ah-ahem…”Fell off a truck.” Or, when you ask where they came across this particular product, the response is “Don’t worry about it…I got a guy.” Who can’t appreciate that?

When I was a kid, it was a few friends who worked at McDonald’s, Dairy Queen and Dunkin’ Donuts. As I got older, it turned into a buddy who was a mechanic. My wife even managed to find someone who just happens to come across inexpensive televisions. Nice! And speaking of my wife, I was even lucky enough to befriend a jeweler years ago. Boy I’ll tell ya, you don’t realize how badly you’re getting screwed by a jewelry store until you bring them a diamond ring you purchased from a private jeweler and they tell you they would price it at almost three times what you paid! Now that’s a hook-up!

But speaking of my wife, I’m not ashamed to say that I had been using her as a hook-up also. Thanks to her job in the golf industry, I’ve played golf courses for a fraction of the regular cost as well as purchased my custom-fit clubs for about half of what it would normally cost. However, that all appears to be gone now. In a move that, for several reasons had to be made, my wife quit her job in the industry and has decided to turn her part-time photography business into her full-time work.

While I of course wish her the best, I will certainly miss the hook-up aspect of the previous job. See, I didn’t play a whole heck of a lot of golf this year. And of the few times I did manage to get out and play, it was at the benefit of my wife’s hookups. So what am I going to do without her?

Of course, her new pursuit has already found me someone who has done my brakes for a great price. It’s also found me an electronics repair guy who can hopefully save me a few bucks as well. Both are great hookups, but it’s still not golf.

I’m worried that without the “hook-up motivation” I may not be out on the course any more next season than I was this one. So I guess we’ll have to see what the off-season brings. You never know, maybe photography will bring her in contact with someone else in the golf industry that can help me out. But if not, as long as my wife is happy with her decision, I’ll settle for brakes and MP3 players.

Swing ’til you’re happy!

Questions / Advertise

info@golfstinks.com

Disclaimers

See here

Privacy Policy

See here