Before we get to the dessert, we must eat our meat and potatoes, or in this case, our Chomsky and Game Theory.
Let’s start with Game Theory. Our short example will make clear a critical point. Four golf course owners are each getting 250 units of the 1000 units spent by golf consumers each day. One day one of the owners realizes that if he cuts prices, he will get more volume, thus bringing in more daily units. He does so, gets 500 units a day, leaving the other three to get, on average, 166 each. They see what is going on, cut their prices, and pretty soon every is getting 1/4 of the business again. What has changed, though, is that consumers are spending only 900 units a day. Maybe another owner gets the idea to cut again and the others have to follow suit.
Price-cutting certainly hasn’t been a trend in golf for the past twenty years (at least not until very recently); the point is that the behavior of a golf course owner is very much dependent upon the behavior of other golf course owners, whether he likes it or not. Here’s what we saw happen: golf course owners, by pushing a narrative that provided the most profit for themselves, have turned golf into a very slow game that costs too much money to play. In our example, the golf course owners were eventually put out of business when they cut their prices so low, none of them were making a profit. What we saw over the past couple of decades was golf course owners lose so many customers, that many of them are having financial difficulties, with many others closing their gates completely.
Now, to quickly make Chomsky’s point about propaganda. Let me quote him:
“One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there’s a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system.”
The way Hack Golf has framed the debate — and they would undoubtedly protest my description — is that there are only two sides: The Way Things Are Now, and Drastic Changes to The Sport Itself. Limiting the discussion to these two ideas prevents people from discussing whether the best and simplest fix would be to undo the trends of past twenty years. Those trends which came courtesy of … the golf industry.
Bear in mind that Hack Golf, despite all the jargon about social media and crowdsourcing, is an initiative funded by TaylorMade. In fact, all such initiatives are funded by entities that thing golf needs “saving.” By which they mean, make money for them.
Let’s look at the motives of those in the golf industry:
Equipment manufacturers: They want to sell more equipment.
Clothing manufacturers: They want to sell more golf clothing.
Golf media: They want more viewers and readers.
Golf course owners: They want more players and for those players to play more often.
People who work at golf courses (greenskeepers, pro shop employees, range house attendents, grill area workers, beer cart girls, golf equipment store clerks, golf instructors, and all the others I left out): They want to keep their jobs!
These are the very people, and motives, which have together acted to put the golf industry in the position it is in right now. (I should point out here that sometimes problems are nobody’s fault, by which I mean things such as demographic or economic trends can override everything else; while I think those factors play an important part in the golf industry’s struggles, I think much of their problem was self-created, not the least of which was a golf course bubble similar to the dotcom bubble.)
The people in the golf industry don’t give a damn about the players. They are the slaughterhouse and you are the cattle. They need you to pay for their mortgage, or daughter’s education, or monthly rent. End of story. Whether you enjoy yourself or not matters only in the sense that it might cause you to return and spend more money.
You all know of corporates executives that focused so much on the next quarter that they ran their companies into the dirt. Pumping up the short-term financials meant large bonuses and raises, to hell with the future. Catch every fish in the pond right now, don’t worry about the future.
Ideas such as the 15-inch hole changes nothing, and, with that specific idea, doesn’t even address a real problem. But, from their point of view, that is beside the point. Trotting out this idea reinforces the idea that the two choices are (1) the status quo, and (2) modifying the game itself, not modifying the actions of those in the industry.
In my next installment, I will get into some of the specific recommendations (which are more fun to read about) but it was important to establish some certain baseline assumptions about my target audience. Lanny H Golf has probably the most intelligent readership of any website on the Internet. We don’t cater to the Lowest Common Denominator crowd; we don’t want them here. Those who scream, “In the hole!,” or who endlessly discuss whether it is Tiger Woods who sucks or Phil Mickelson who sucks, or who proudly state, “I only watch when Tiger plays,” well, I can’t imagine a single one of them has read to this point.
Lanny H Golf 