GOLF

Taranaki Daily News, 16 November 1927, Page 5

GOLF

IS GAME TOO COSTLY? THE PRICE OF BETTER COURSES. (By Harry Vardon. —Copyright). It is sometimes said that golf is becoming too expensive. This, perhaps, is a question for the amateur rather than the professional. The amateur does all the paying in connection with the pastime, whereas the professional is privileged to live by it. All the same, the latter has a fairly shrewd idea as to what it costs to be a golfer, especially when lie competes in tournaments without winning a prize, or takes part in private matches for the sheer pleasure of playing, as he does far more often, I think, than where the professional in any other game is concerned.

Moreover, as an individual who is a golf trader as well as a golf enthusiast, lie is apt to hear all the grievances about cost. It is in the nature of humanity to unburden its soul on this subject to the man who does some of the receiving. Consequently, he has a qualification to express his views on the problem.

Let us examine the situation. It is not that the complainants suggest that anybody is profiteering. For example, one has only to take the trouble to ascertain the financial condition of golf clubs to realise that no exhorbitant profits are being derived. Even the clubs that have large memberships need to be well managed to pay their way. The truth is, perhaps, that with the country groaning under the weight of tremendous taxation, many people find golf not dear but more than they can comfortably afford. THE ECONOMICAL BALL. In what way could it be made cheaper? The present halfcrown ball is, in point of fact, more eeopomical than the old gutta-percha ball at a shilling. With ordinary luck, the rubber- cored ball can be made to last at least four rounds, and often more.

It is beside the point if the individual feels that he must put down a new ball at the start of every round. One thing certain is that the “gutty” was seldom of any use after one round, so that for the average person, the expenditure on golf balls is probably less than it was twenty years ago. Certainly it can be less, and that without diminishing the pleasure of playing. Clubs are double the old price, which is about the proportion of everything, but to the golfer who already has a complete set and to spare, a new club is an occasional pleasure, like a seat at the theatre, and hardly qualified to rank as a serious contributory cause to his regular expenditure on the game. So exactly where is to be located the ground of his trouble? I suppose he feels as much as anything the increased annual subscriptions, especially when he belongs to several club's. The requests for these subscriptions like the more brusque demands for taxes, come in large portions; he is asked for twelve guineas here, ten guineas there, and eight guineas somewhere else, and he begins to think that golf has attained a degree of expensiveness which neither his bank balance nor his income can endure much longer. The charges for railway fares, cab fares, lunches, and caddies, amount to far more in a year than the doubled dues to the dubs of which he is a member, but he consoles himself. with the thought that whatever he did for a day's recreation would cost him as much, as the railway and cab fares to the course, and that wherever lie lunched, he would have to pay as much for the meal as at the golf club; very likely more. The raised subscriptions come as annual blows; they crystallize the increased expenditure by descending upon him in solid lumps. Whether club subscriptions ever will be lowered seems to be open to considerable doubt. If the step could be taken, probably it would be the best thing possible for the continued vitalization and expansion of the game—the activity and growth that it must be able to command in order to make the clubs successful —for it is the subscription, the jumping-off place for the year, that sets the golfer ruminating about increased expenses and convinces him that he must economise somewhere.

DRAINING THE REVENUE. At present, the cost of running a club is unquestionably very high. Take the case of a club which has no pretensions to greatness. It conducts its affairs so as to give as much pleasure as possible to its members on a course of eighteen holes that never could be made very good, and in a club-house that may be described as unpretentious and homely. It attempts nothing on a big scale. It is a club of which I know little, but I do know that it is typical of many. Its eye is to economy. It gives its secretary an honorarium of £5O a year; the prizes that it presents do not cost £4O in twelve months, the papers that it provides in the club-house cost a shilling or two a week. And yet it has to spend £3OOO a year to carry on its modest work, over £2009 of that sum being absorbed by labour, rent and taxes.

That being so. the expenditure at some of the proprietary clubs, on whose courses everything that can be done to secure improvement is done almost regardless of cost, must be enormous. Even can one pity the unfortunate proprietors. Rents and rates and taxes appear never likely to be reduced. Presumably labour offers a more hopeful outlook, and it is a very big item in the annual outlay of almost every golf club. One tiling fairly certain is that the golfer with all his perturbation about the price of things, would never go back to the unsophisticated state of affairs that prevailed thirty years ago, when fairways, putting greens, and bunkers took something like pot-luck—doing their best to remain usable with only the most perfunctory attempts nt upkeep. The modern golfer has come to know better conditions, and the club has to provided them for him.