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Golf is NOT dead

By , Houston Chronicle
Golf "endures peaks and valleys, but it is not Liquid Paper or the rotary dial phone."
Golf "endures peaks and valleys, but it is not Liquid Paper or the rotary dial phone."

I play a dying sport and don't even know it? Hmmm. This is the sort of silliness one hears periodically. Truth is, golf is fine. What really happened is that the Tiger Woods boom era came to an end, as it inevitably would. The economic collapse did not help. There is no doubt that course building went crazy during the last two decades. Houston, like many major urban areas, ended up with an oversupply. It's just a business cycle. But it's not as if they all went belly-up. Arrows go up, arrows go down. Equipment sales, likewise, suffered from an explosion of R&D and the determination of some major companies to believe that the right business model was based on marketing and constant "newness." The availability of cheap Chinese-based manufacturing made such an approach easy to buy into. There is a glut of golf stuff like never before. None of this means the sport is dying.

There are issues, to be sure. But is there a more popular individual sport? If golf is dying, tennis is stone-cold dead. That sport was a huge deal when I was young. Now you can't find five people in 100 who can name 10 professional players. Or even five. Times change. America today is a banquet of choice. We can listen to 100 or more radio stations catering to every niche. Same with TV. The sports menu has multiplied as well, and those of the X Games variety also have claimed a chunk of the country's youth. No particular sport will dominate when it comes to participation, but naturally team sports tend to draw the most interest for obvious reasons, starting with the desire of parents to get their kids involved in healthy group activities. But anyone who thinks that golf is the preserve of the affluent elderly white male should walk out to a golf course and see who's there. They would be surprised. They also will find that the majority of these courses are filled with people. They don't look like cemeteries. (Or tennis courts.) Rare was the woman a couple generations back who knew much of anything about golf. Now you have millions of girls playing, a fair portion hoping to get college scholarships. There was one from around here who had that exact dream. Nobody told her the sport would soon be dead. Good thing. Otherwise Stacy Lewis might not be the top-ranked player in the world.

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America today is a banquet of choice. Choose Gray Matters.

How often do we hear that baseball is dying? This is such a common theme when it comes to media representation of sports. Either it's booming like crazy or it's dying. It was only a decade ago we would see constant stories about the incredible worldwide golf boom, some of it fueled by Tiger's incredible performances, of course. The Golf Channel was born and quickly laughed at. In time Arnold Palmer and his partners who started it laughed all the way to the bank. NBC decided to buy it, and it cost the network a bundle. I suspect the decision was not based on the notion that it would be fun to own a great broadcast vehicle to cover the death of a sport. Compared to golf as it was when Palmer and Nicklaus were king, the sport today is a total behemoth. It has surged in popularity in Europe and Asia. It won't be long before China has the most active golfers in the world. Yes, it will have down times. And yes, it costs money to play, and it takes time. I am always  amused when people who will sit around watching football for four hours complain that it's crazy to spend that much time actually participating in a sport. People tend to have the time if they want to have the time.

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I say, be skeptical of pronouncements about the death of certain things. It's all a matter of perspective. Golf is OK. It endures peaks and valleys, but it is not Liquid Paper or the rotary dial phone. Of course golf is not football or futbol. Never has been. But it has never been played by more people in more places than it is today. It can be maddeningly difficult to play well, but that's the eternal allure of it. People don't stand around complaining about the difficulty or learning to play the piano or guitar or saxophone. Does a sport or hobby have to be easy to be popular? Dunno. Methinks if it's easy to be good at something, then that something probably ain't worth doing.

Mike Tolson has been a journalist for more than 30 years and has worked for five newspapers, four of them in Texas. Although most of his career has been spent as a news reporter, he also wrote for features and sports sections in earlier years, and he was the city columnist for four years at the San Antonio Light.

At the Houston Chronicle, he has specialized in long-term projects and long-form weekend articles, while also handling daily reporting duties.

As a general assignments reporter, Tolson has written articles on just about every subject imaginable over the course of his career. However, he has specialized knowledge of civil and criminal justice matters.

A Georgia native, Tolson moved to Texas in 1964 and graduated from The University of Texas in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He has lived in Texas' three major cities as well as Austin, Abilene and Temple. He is married and has two children.