To golf or not?

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.

William Wordsworth

I can't help but think, that this sums up the current state of play within golf.  In a week which has seen the third golf club in Scotland close this year, we have to face up to the reality that golf participation is heading towards a crisis point.  

If being honest, as society has evolved, golf has lagged behind.  Or rather the public perception of golf has not kept up.  If you approached a non golfing member of the public, their view of golf would be middle aged, pot-bellied men, dressed liked 1970's pimps, before adjourning to their private members bar for a Pimms, in their club blazer and tie.

Whether we like it or not, golf to many is still seen as elitist and this is a hurdle we need to overcome to bring in new blood.

We must also be realistic. There are certain clubs and courses that will never face financial or participation issues.  If you turned around and told someone that they couldn't play the Old Course without wearing tartan trousers, they would go buy a pair just to play it. 

On the other hand if you are a new club, inside a large community, you have a fight on your hands just to get anyone on your course.  

Golf really suffers due to a lack of good PR/public perception.  It still maintains its elitist, rich mans persona and this was shown last week when the R&A announced its honorary female members and chose Princess Anne over Kate Middleton.  The latter would have raised both interest from a much needed younger audience as well as giving an air of a much more accessible sport. 

Let's paint with a broad brush for a second.  If you are male, middle aged and an established golfer, you are looking for an established club, a challenging golf course, driving range and good club facilities.  However, if you are in your twenties, female, and looking to broaden your interests and horizons what are you looking for? Accessible facilities, that suit a beginner, but give you the ability to progress your skills and game, and support from other members. 

So what is the answer? Is there an answer? 

There is no one right answer for every club.  Each club needs to look at the situation on its own merits.  They need to stop thinking like a club and treat it like a business.  They need to look at their current market and the markets that they want to expand into and perform a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) on their current procedures.  They need to revisit their marketing and target their audiences appropriately with the desirable message. 

And here we have another issue.  Committees.  My observations are, clubs that's have been managed and where the manager has been allowed to manage, are perceived to be more successful than clubs that are managed by committee.

Reality is, that on any committee personal agendas will always take precedence to good business.  Some individuals fail to look at the bigger picture and in particular the long term situation, to the detriment of the clubs that they are involved in. 

So in my opinion if you are a club that is facing membership or financial struggles, do your market research and employ good PR/marketing.  This is a vital part of any business, and while your club is maybe committee run, it needs to function as a business to survive.

But let's be clear on this there is no fit all solution.  You need to look at your location, membership, potential membership and community around you to find the answers you are looking for. 

Ask not what your club can do for you, but what you can do for your club!

A fitting prize.

The late Luther Vandross once told us the best things in life are free.  Now being a Scotsman its a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse!

In December, Callaway ran a 'Twelve days of Christmas' competition. Basically, you had to identify the golfer with a blanked out face and if correct you won a prize. These were everything from a hat to a set of irons. I was lucky enough to win. In fact I was lucky enough to win the top prize; a new set of Callaway irons!

Happy bunny to the Nth degree!

But just when I thought how lucky I had been my delight got cranked up to the next level.

Cameron from Callaway got in contact: "Do you know what irons you want?" he asked. Well this threw me. I had assumed that it would simply be a set Callaway had in stock, I never expected a choice! I felt like all my Christmases had come at once. Explaining to Cameron that I honestly didn't know. He then asked "Would you like to go for a custom fitting in St.Andrews?" I think my reply was along the lines of bears, toilets and woods!

A couple of years ago, I had written a story on Callaway's Performance Centre within the Golf Academy at St.Andrews. I never thought I would have the privilege of using it personally. It is a fantastic facility.

Fully trained professionals that know exactly what they are doing and fitting facilities second to none, including Trackman.

After a somewhat "entertaining" 2 1/2 hour drive I arrived a wee tad stressed, but after a large black coffee I started to feel humanish again and hit 25 balls with my own clubs to loosen off before meeting my fitter Greg Patterson.

Greg showed me through to the fitting bay and explained to me what we would be doing and about Trackman. Trackman is a launch monitor that breaks down all the information you need to analyse the technical aspects of your swing and show you were you can improve. Shows you the stuff that the human eye can't see.

We then started with me hitting with my own irons to give us a benchmark to work from.

Greg explained to me that what we were trying to do was find the irons that increased my ball speed and improved my smash factor.

What is smash factor? I hear you ask. Well technically smash factor is ball speed divided by club speed. If you swing a club at 100 mph and your ball speed is 150 mph then your smash factor is 1.5. Are you with me? Or basically how cleanly you hit the ball but let me emphasise that is the most basic of basic explanations. Your attack angle and your swing patch can both impact your smash factor; but in fitting it's basically used to make sure you are using correctly fitting irons. The Trackman web site is well worth a visit to get a proper explanation of everything this brilliant piece of technology does for golfers.

My swing speed virtually never varied more than a couple of mph throughout the fitting, my ball speed on the other hand did. The difference between the ball speed of my own clubs to the ones I got fitted for was 15mph. My smash factor went from 1.22 to 1.3. Greg had explained that he was aiming to raise this to as near as 1.5 as possible so we were definitely heading in the right direction.  A little work from me will help to improve this further.

During the fitting I hit the Apex, XR and big Bertha heads with varying lies, shaft wise we hit about 6 or 7 variations in well over an hour. To see the Trackman feed back on each combination was fascinating. It shows you everything from trajectory to distance, speed to spin, the analysis is phenomenal and combined with Greg's expertise leads to some amazing results. 

For example if I had been hitting balls by myself, I would have thought the XR was the ones I had hit most consistently. The Trackman, however, showed me that I would have been wrong! The head I hit, consistently better with and further, was the Apex. If buying off the shelf on a range without Trackman analysis I would have left with the wrong irons.

The XR looks very good on the eye and gives you confidence when you look at it. It's like a sleek X18 and is a very good iron.

The Apex is simply a stunning head, that gives you tremendous feedback. When I hit a bad shot I knew immediately if it was towards the heel or the toe. When you look down on the Apex you want to hit a good shot just to feel nothing but sheer pleasure from it.

At 52 I kinda knew my days of steel shafts were slipping behind me. I discovered that if any one thing was responsible for my increase in ball speed it was the UST graphite shaft. When I first hit it I thought it was too light, I was getting very little feel from it. The truth is, like most men, I simply didn't want to own up to the fact that graphite is simply better for me. 

Men, in particular golfers, have that macho ego. We are men, hunters, gatherers, providers! Graphite is for women and old men! Well that makes me either a woman or an old man then. If graphite shafts make me a better golfer then I am going to use them, simple as that! If you are like I was then simply go and hit a stiff graphite shaft in an iron, the difference in length is basically a full club.

So in about 10 days time I will get on the course with my new Callaway Apex irons and lets see how many shots professionally fitted clubs will save me.

As for the fitting experience at St.Andrews, I will simply say this. If you are buying a new set of Callaway's then try to do it there or any other Callaway Performance Centre.  These guys are use to dealing with professionals and top class golfers. In my experience they treat you in exactly the same way. I honestly have not a word of complaint nor could I find a single fault of the whole Callaway experience.

But I will end with a cautionary tale. It's been over 3 weeks since I hit a ball, so on Sunday I hit 300 at the Paul Lawrie range. This resulted in some awful blistering on my fingers; I basically hit 200 too many! As a result of this, towards the end of the fitting I was in a fair bit of pain and my takeaway got weak as I tried to protect my fingers. Please don't make that same mistake.

Reboot time

Is it really February ?

What the hell happened to January?

I will admit to losing January this year, we all go through bad spells and I have had a nightmare 4 weeks.j  I never even shaved for four weeks and was in danger of turning into a ZZ top clone.

Sometimes things happen in life that are simply out with your control. Out side forces and influences are just that and you just have to accept it.

What woke me up and got me moving was a bit of good news, works for us all I think.

In December I was lucky, very lucky, to win a set of Callaway irons via their 12 days of Christmas giveaway on Twitter.

A brilliant prize, a dream prize but it never really registered with me.

Well until I had a conversation with Callaway last week:
"Do you know what irons you want" they asked, I had not a clue!
"Would you like to come down to St.Andrews and get custom fitted?"
Then reality hit me.

I had been in such a bad place for the four weeks I had not been to the gym, not hit golf balls, basically I had withdrawn completely from everything.

This was my wake up call!

Not only a new set of irons but a set of custom fitted irons by the guys that fit pro's!

How lucky am I!

So yesterday it actually got real! Yes I was lucky, very lucky!

All of a sudden that bit of drive and desire started to appear back.

After work I went to the range and hit 300 balls. Well hit is not the right choice of words, I worked with 300 balls.

Stance, grip, swing, alignement, tempo, I genuinely worked on it. Ok I blistered my hands, have sore bits today where I never knew I could get sore bits. I even my reactivated glutes, but I feel better than I have in ages.

This morning I have been looking for golf specific exercises for the gym. For the first time in weeks I genuinely want to go to the gym!

I have even been costing out lessons!

I am not going to look this gift horse in the mouth. I have been given a great opportunity from Callaway here and I know owe it to them to show how good their product is.

But more importantly I owe it to me! Yes it's been an awful four weeks, but the good news is there's another forty eight weeks that will be better.

2015 starts now, buckle up folks its going to be a great one.