How To Make Golf Relevant in the Technological Age

Article by Herb Rubenstein

Introduction

Golf economics is being challenged by a perfect storm of problems:

• Golf retailers overbuilt

• Golf manufacturers cannibalize their own products too quickly

• Golf courses are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain

• Environmental concerns about golf are on the rise

• Golf instruction is too expensive

• Learning how to play golf well takes too much time in this “instant age”

• Golf has not kept up with the potential for advances in Information technology

• Investments in the sport are taking place at the professional, tour levels, but not as much in the beginners, amateurs, and occasional golfer level

• Golf has not been inclusive enough to minorities or women

• Golf has been branded as elitist and irrelevant to physical health and well being

• And I could go on

This article only deals with one aspect of golf – its failure to keep up with all that is available from our information technology revolution. First, I document the problem. Second, I offer some suggestions to remedy this situation. All of the other issues about golf are real, and are of great concern to me and many others in the game. Only those who think that all is well with the sport of golf could ignore these real problems with the game of golf.

My goal is to increase access to and enjoyment of golf by more and more people without negatively impacting the environment. We need to find a way to engage those of the video game age to see the magnificence of the game and learn the real benefits of the game to them and their well-being.

The Basic Premise

Thelonious Monk was a creative jazz musician at the vanguard of this developing sound. He struggled to gain acceptance of “his” music. Then he got a new agent who said “his” music was great, but you must meet your audience at least halfway. His new agent got him to play some traditional music and soon the crowds came, and the records sold. He met his audience halfway and then took them on a jazz journey that changed many lives, changed jazz itself, and entertained millions.

Golf has basically stayed golf for much of the last 100 years. Sure, new club and ball designs are more forgiving, new golf courses are dazzling and entertaining, but where is Moore’s law when it comes to golf, that the productivity of the industry will double every two years. There basically have been no productivity gains in golf in the past decade. It still takes too long to learn the game of golf to be any good at it. The rules are still so cumbersome that millions of viewers and golf experts can legitimately disagree on whether a penalty should be called on a golfer who did nothing wrong, but his ball moved. The cost of golf has gone up, not down in the past fifty years.

The basic premise of this article is that golf now has to meet people halfway. That is, as more and more young people use video games and computer-based learning, we need computer-based infusions into the game of golf. While we probably need fifty, I will only discuss five of these that need to occur so that young people who are information technology wizards and are glued to their smartphones and are text crazy, can combine their love of technology with their love of golf.

The Five Recommendations

Recommendation 1:

Anyone who has played Beth Page Black, the world-renowned public golf course in New York knows that a caddie is indispensable to helping you figure out what to do and what not to do on that penalizing course. Today, we need a tool that not only uses GPS to tell you distance, wind, slope, the location of the pin, we need a tool that give you what a caddie gives you. It would send you a text for every shot you are about to hit with the “hidden wisdom” of the course built into the text providing service. It would be able to know where you are at every second on the course so it can advise you on how to play your next shot and the speed of the green. It can even tell you about the expected break in the putt you are about to hit. This virtual assistant will guide you to playing quicker and improving the pace of play is essential for golf to expand its reach to those who crave instant success and demand that things happen quickly around them.

Recommendation 2:

We need an application available on Smart Phones to be able to take one’s score down, and the score of all opponents if you are keeping their score, and either automatically by sensing how many times you “hit the ball” on a given hole or do it by voice activation. In addition, the app would record the other key elements of golf scoring including how man putts you hit on the hole, whether you hit the fairway or rough, whether you hit the green in regulation, your average distance putt for each length of shot you hit into the green, and how many and what type of penalty shots you had on a given hole. All of these stats in one place will give the golfer the ability to learn where their weaknesses are and more importantly track their progress. The USGA’s rule that you cannot use a golf score if you played alone would no longer be necessary if, as bowling has done, the score is calculated automatically.

Recommendation 3:

Now that you know the course instantly via text applicable to every shot you would be faced with on a course, and have all the recordkeeping handled automatically, the next information technology thing golf needs to do is put a chip in a ball to tell you where the ball is. Looking for a ball is not only obsolete in an era when a satellite can find it in .000000000000000001 seconds, but also the ultimate waste of time. Professional golfers, and well-heeled amateurs with caddies and forecaddies, and crowds lining the fairways, and cameras tracking where every shot goes, do not have to endure this relic of a bygone era. Patents have been issued to put the chip in the ball that will do exactly this. It is time to achieve this important information technology milestone in golf.

Recommendation 4:

Tracking the results of every club in your bag. Beyond Game Golf which is a huge advancement in the information technology in the field, and similar programs, the internet of things now allows devices to be put on any golf club to track every shot. Now it is time to put this information technology inside golf clubs so that people who want to improve can access the data easily showing them trends in the results that occur in every shot, not only on the golf course, but also on every driving range, even those at Top Golf.

Recommendation 5:

We need information-analytical approaches that teach you the most likely cause whenever you are achieving less than ideal results from your golf shots. Zepp golf moves inch by inch in this direction by telling me about my swing path, rhythm, swing speed, face angle, etc., but it cannot link its data with my shot results. So, I can learn how to reach some process goals with Zepp and other such devices, but how can I know that for a particular shot I want to hit, what should my swing speed, swing path, face angle, etc. should be?

Embedding this teaching will give the golfer who wants to improve quickly a trial and error approach to the game that is now too much error and not enough trial. For example, if I want to hit a shot with a low trajectory exactly 70 yards since I am playing against a 20 mph wind, I may hit 100 of those types of shots on the range, and a few of them will feel perfect. I want to know the stats on that shot. I want to know my hip turn, shoulder turn numbers, swing speed, optimal hand position, how far to take the club back, and if I try this shot with each of my four or five wedges, I will need to figure out which club works best for me in this exact shot. How do I learn this today? In most places I cannot learn this, but with information technology’s help, I could learn this in either an outdoor driving range, or even an indoor golf practice facility.

Conclusion

Golf is a result-oriented game, but uses a process orientation for learning. The more precise we get in the result we want, the more elusive the game is because we cannot learn enough or fast enough about new courses and their conditions, cannot learn enough (without a good teacher by our side at every minute) fast enough to master all of the parts of the game, and have at our fingertips at the end of a round too little information to understand how we perform on the course, in what can be high-pressure situations.

The technology has been in place for most all these things I recommend for years, if not decades. Until someone brings golf to the information age, we can kiss off all of those youngers and middle age IT enabled humans who would love the game of golf if we met them halfway. If Thelonious Monk was willing to do it, golf should be willing to do it as well.