The Pellucid Perspective - July 2020 - 5

INDUSTRY ISSUES

PHOTO BY OLIMPIK/SHUTTERSTOCK

It will take a lot more than just the USGA; it will take
all the game's normative leadership organizations
plus the game's business stakeholders and the
millions of golfers who love the game and
want to see it thrive for their children,
grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Golf 's Charitable Virtue

Better Balance Needed Between PR and Preservation
By Craig Kessler and Tom Addis III

olf raises a lot of money for charitable causes. The PGA
Tour drops plenty of it in each city it visits. Local golfers everywhere donate to the junior programs run by
amateur associations, professional sections, First Tee chapters,
and myriad homegrown organizations. It's a laudable record,
one that golfers everywhere ought to take pride in.
Whether San Francisco's Harding Park, San Diego's Torrey Pines, Tacoma's Chambers Bay, or New York's Bethpage
Black, the game has invested millions into already superb
municipal golf courses and turned them into sites capable of
hosting the game's most prestigious major championships.
That too is a laudable enterprise that golfers everywhere ought
to take pride in.
But the time has come for golf to consider funneling some
of those charitable dollars toward a more self-interested form
of giving - toward a version so many other games and sports
have adopted in recent years.
Other sports/games raise substantial sums not for the kinds
of non-related local charities the PGA Tour makes so much
of, but rather for what is not "charity" at all, but enlightened
self-interest. Whether tennis, soccer or little league baseball,
devotees of those sports can knock on doors of policymakers
with a little cash in hand to do one thing or another in the
interest of their game, and no "interest" is more important than
buttressing the developmental loss leaders each game has in
the nation's cities. It's hard to grow your game without sites
to grow it.

WWW.PELLUCIDCORP.COM

Golf ? We go to the table seen as rich, old, white, elitists
come down the hill from the country club to lecture the policymakers about the greatness of our game and do so with nary
a penny in hand to lend to the effort. Programs, yes; facilities
no. And then we whine that others get, while we don't. Go
figure!
The game was struggling before COVID-19 sent the nation
into an economic tailspin, nowhere more so than in the municipal sector, where developmental facilities that never turned
a profit and tired facilities that failed to reinvest in their capital
stock were already on the endangered species list. Those lists
promise to only grow longer as park budgets throughout the
land are slashed.
A Jeremiad without hope is no better than a whine with
nary a penny in hand. And nothing offers hope better than real
life examples. We have two of them - a recent occurrence in
the nation's Capitol and something from the recent past.
Washington D.C. has shown us an enlightened self-interested path toward revitalizing some of the nation's tired, neglected municipal tracks - not the ones with championship
bones, but the ones with average bones, the facilities that made
it possible for golf to grow from a 19th Century backwater to
a 21st Century giant.
The National Parks Service recently awarded a long-term
lease to the National Links Trust (NLT) not to gentrify Washington D.C.'s three municipal golf courses or otherwise make
them fit to conduct national championships, but rather to reTHE PELLUCID PERSPECTIVE

http://WWW.PELLUCIDCORP.COM

The Pellucid Perspective - July 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Pellucid Perspective - July 2020