I suppose you’ve got to admire a man for sticking to his word.
About a year ago Adam Scott announced he had no interest in competing in golf’s return to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this August.
Any cajoling, blandishments and more strident attempts to get the Australian to change his mind over the past 12 months have proved fruitless as he announced last week he was sticking to his guns.
No sooner had we digested the cousin Adam’s statement confirming his absence from the Games than Louis Oosthuizen of South Africa also announced that he wouldn’t be going to Rio. Vijay Singh, another major champion, is also set to decline the opportunity to play for Fiji.
I think Scott, Oosthuizen and Singh (actually strike Vijay, I don’t really care what he thinks about anything anymore) are dead wrong, as are any out there now wavering on the edge of pulling out, as no doubt a few are.
This is not borne of any great desire to see golf in the Olympics at all, at least not in the format which is proposed for Rio. I’m not exactly agog with excitement of another restricted field 72-hole strokeplay event.
The format proposed for Rio is profoundly unsatisfactory. The shoehorning of the Olympic event into golf’s already crunched schedule is a significant issue for the tours and the players.
The International Golf Federation and the tours, with considerable input from the IOC, have had several years to put together a reasonable format and failed utterly, due to the usual blend of diplomatic compromise and the innate dodginess of the entire Olympic administrative process.
But it is what it is. And the worth of the Olympic Golf tournament for the sport is perfectly plain; it’s a vehicle to promote golf to areas the game can’t currently reach.
Golf’s attempts to promote itself beyond its own narrow confines – the moneyed middle classes, mostly – has utterly failed. Participation is down, and the game’s current demographic, as we harp on about in T2G almost every week, is downright frightening for the future.
We’ve just had what many would regard as golf’s biggest annual vehicle for promoting itself globally, the Masters tournament. And what does it show golf as? An ultra-exclusive club for multi-millionaires, with fussy, antiquated standards of behaviour that sometimes border on primary school discipline.
Furthermore, for three days of that tournament the organisers are arrogant enough to insist that millions around the world can’t see what’s happening by refusing to allow broadcasters the right to show play for hours on end.
Golf people love the Masters. I love the Masters. But it does next to nothing to get new people involved in the sport. It’s a four-day long preach to the already converted.
The Olympics, on the other hand, will go into living rooms across the world where golf doesn’t go. It’ll open up the purse strings of the many governments across the world who insist on Olympic status before they will support a sport.
To me, it’s incumbent for all who qualify for the Olympics to participate. It’s one week out of the season to go and do some good for the sport instead of the individual, who still has all the other 51 weeks to make his or her money.
Enhance the status next time
There’s a simple solution to fitting the Olympics into golf’s packed schedule, while enhancing its status so we don’t get self-interested players pulling out.
Simply give the Olympic competition WGC status. Once every four years, either Doral, the Bridgestone or Shanghai is replaced by the Olympic event, with full ranking points.
Loch Lomond still has that aura
This weekend Dundonald Links was confirmed as the venue for the 2017 Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Open.
The excellent Kyle Phillips designed neo-links near Irvine, which already hosts the Scottish Ladies’ Open, is being tweaked to take out a few idiosyncracies and a new modern clubhouse built.
Dundonald is owned by Loch Lomond Golf Club, the former host of the Scottish until 2010. After the Scottish left, the big gates of the old Colquhoun estate clanged shut as the club sorted itself out from near receivership with a member buyout.
The club’s future is now secure, and they are hinting at opening up those gates again, inviting some members of the media back last week, as if to say, undemonstratively,“we’re still here”.
It hasn’t changed a bit. There’s no better inland setting for golf in Scotland, maybe in the UK. The course remains first class, some holes – the 10th for example – among the very best in this country.
The club are taking tentative steps to ending their self-imposed isolation. It should have an event again; the Scottish got huge crowds there and has never quite recaptured them in its links venues of late.
People loved to go to Loch Lomond, it was the closest anyone has got to that overused promotional claim “the Augusta of Scotland”. Here’s hoping.