Can someone who has never seen a traditional course call themselves a golfer? What else are they, said Robert Maxfield?
Speaking to Sarah Stirk on GBQ TV, the Chief Executive of the PGA said the sport’s biggest challenge was transitioning the huge numbers of people playing the game in some form – whether that was driving ranges or simulators – to a golf course environment.
The governing body’s Golf for All report, produced last year in association with IPSOS Mori, revealed something like 22 million people had played or consumed golf media at least once a year.
Adventure Golf has become enormously popular with 60 per cent of infrequent players having been introduced to the sport through this format.
But asked by Stirk about the view of traditionalists, who might still argue it isn’t “proper golf”, Maxfield agreed the narrative needed to be changed.
“Look at the IPSOS study,” he said. “The figures speak for themselves. There is a massive proportion now that are engaged and interested in golf.
“I think 22 million people – that’s a huge percentage of the population – have engaged in some type of golf. That might be watching golf on the TV. It might have been reading about it.
“When you then get down to people who’ve actually had a golf club in their hand it’s 16 million people.
“16 million had a golf club in their hand at least once a year over the year that we tracked it, of which 11 million have never played on a golf course. Six million have played traditional golf. That’s 9, 18, or members of clubs, and many of them aren’t nowadays.
“That’s 11 million people that are now engaged in golf in some form. It might be putting through a dinosaur. It might be smashing balls on a range. That’s huge.
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“And to me, if we say, ‘well, you’re only a golfer if you’re on a golf course’, I don’t think that’s right.
“If you’ve got a club in your hand and you were playing on the driving range two or three times a week – my kids have got friends of theirs that only play on driving ranges – I think they are golfers. What else are they?”
How crucial is Adventure Golf to the future of the sport?
On how to entice those people to play on a golf course – and move from a fun format to a more traditional form of the game, Maxfield added: “That is the biggest challenge golf faces, in many ways. We all go back to the 80s, where every golf club had a waiting list and it took years to get in and they built more golf courses.
“We then went through that time when a number of golf courses didn’t have waiting lists. We’re now back to that point where many golf clubs have now got waiting lists.
“So this pent up demand of 11 million people – not all of them will want to play golf traditionally but a good proportion of them will – is really difficult.
“To me, that is the biggest challenge golf faces – that transition. Go back, in years gone by, where there were lots of municipals where we maybe started to play.
“There were some rough cut courses. There were lots of rough cut courses when the game started in Scotland and you haven’t necessarily got that now. So bridging that gap is really difficult.
“We are starting to see the advent of more driving ranges, more Adventure Golf, more simulator golf. We are starting to see some shorter formats, some shorter courses being developed, but there are still probably not enough of them.”
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Stressing how key this move would be over the next decade, Maxfield again urged clubs to consider the experience they offered to players who might look to dip their toe into the waters of more conventional formats.
“It’s easy for me to say, ‘it’s easy for golf clubs to satisfy their financial needs because you’ve got this pent-up demand’,” he explained.
“But if golf clubs consider these groups of people that might want to play golf in its traditional form, I think it’s really, really, important those clubs are able to adapt, become more friendly and become more welcoming.
“Don’t ask people to tuck their shirts in and all the things they used to do in the past. There’s a massive opportunity to do that but the game has got to change and adapt.
“That transition is one of the biggest challenges we’ve got.”
Now have your say
What do you think of the Adventure Golf argument? Is someone who plays pitch and putt, Adventure Golf, or hits a ball on a driving range a golfer? Let us know by leaving a comment on X.
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