Vancouver Golf: A Good Game Spoiled

Vancouver golf | BCBusiness
While developing golf courses around the Lower Mainland used to be the ticket to riches, the local links have fallen out of favour.

Shifting consumer habits, population growth and high costs have hit the golf industry hard. The industry is spiraling downwards as competition for a dwindling customer base increases.

A long time ago, I was a golfer. I worked afternoons so a couple of times a week I would hit the local links early for a quick round. I laughed at that anonymous (No, it wasn’t Mark Twain) quote that “Golf is a good walk spoiled”.

Not that I was that great at it — I broke 90 sometimes, and once, by some miracle (a sudden gust of wind, I suspect), won a long-drive contest. But it was a pleasant pastime, good exercise and I got to spend some time outdoors.  

That all petered out when  golf courses began filling up, meaning playing a round took longer and longer. Now, if someone asks me if I play golf, I laugh: “What, are you kidding? Who has the time for that?”

Apparently, I’m not alone in this thinking. The golf course industry in the Lower Mainland isn’t playing too well these days as money and memberships shrink. Something about young people (read, anyone under baby boomer age) not taking up the game the way they used to.

Many owners of courses, which exploded over the past 20 years to meet demand, are now scrambling to bring out duffers in the familiar numbers. Others are even talking about selling out to today’s great fad — condominium developments.

Why am I not surprised? This is a classic case of an industry overshooting itself at a time when buyers’ priorities shifted to other things.

Golf is now a good game that has been spoiled.

Simply, playing golf became too difficult and too expensive. Over the past 20 years, golf courses were the ticket to riches and developers couldn’t build them fast enough. But population growth at the same time meant most of the new courses were farther and farther away and, increasingly, golfers had to navigate gridlocked roads to get in a game.  

Combine long travel times with ever-slowing rounds (due to overuse), and today, a golf game can easily take six to eight hours. At the same time, fees went up and up to pay for ever increasing costs of land, creating a time-and-money vice that slowly throttled the game.

But I believe what really put golfing on the downslope was shifting habits and personal living styles. The workplace became tougher and people became more entrepreneurial, which meant they had different priorities and less time.

Young people, who were supposed to keep those courses humming, became more interested in technology than trotting around a grassy field all day. They started families, discovered other forms of exercise and took up technology.

If this generation plays any golf now, it’s probably on their smartphones.