The outgoing chief executive of the R&A, Martin Slumbers, has lately being doing a round of interviews to acknowledge the end of his reign. Among the things that struck me were some of the numbers.
In an interview with John Huggan for Golf Digest, he spoke about attending his first Open Championship, at Royal Troon in 2016. “There were 170,000 people there,” he said. “It’s a big course and it felt empty. This year we had 250,000 and it certainly did not feel empty.” By developing the championship and doing more to promote the Open, the R&A has doubled the money it can invest in the game, up to £200 million from £100 million. The number of golfers under the R&A’s worldwide jurisdiction stands at 62.3 million – “a million higher than it was a year ago,” said Slumbers. A large part of this is down to the accelerated emphasis in getting more women and girls into playing golf. According to R&A statistics, in 2022 there were 5.6 million golfers who had played a full-length course in Great Britain & Ireland, up from 5.3 million in 2021.
As one would expect, he does not view the game through hopelessly rose-tinted spectacles. Having paid tribute to the way the game flourished despite (because of?) Covid in 2020 and 2021, Slumbers regrets the fact that the game then caught LIV. “In 2022, this divisiveness emerged,” he told James Corrigan of the Daily Telegraph. “It just put a big brake on the game – the pro game, that is. Because after seeing membership and participation falling every year from 2006 to 2018, the recreational game is now booming. To me, the biggest danger for the pro game is that de-linking.” He sees the possibility of the Americans being paid to playing the next Ryder Cup as part of the same problem. “Some viewing figures are up but a lot of them are down and I think that has a lot to do with that whole concept of constantly talking about money. Unfortunately, the male professional game has become de-linked from the fan.”
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It’s hard to argue with that, I think, especially when viewed in conjunction with the general rude international health of the game we play. A piece in the Financial Times a few weeks ago noted: “The global trend for golf shows no sign of diminishing. Residential golf resorts worldwide are welcoming new names among the established favourites.” One such old favourite is Quinta do Lago on Portugal’s Algarve coast. It has reported that the average ages of its property owners has dropped from 70 in the 1990s to 45-plus today. That is admittedly taking on board a demographic who can afford an overseas villa but it is indicative of growth rather than atrophy.
The golf-playing general public love the game as much as we ever did; perhaps more so. But do the people at the top of the men’s professional game love anything other than money?
You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com as well as his golf archive on robertgreen-golf.com
