Swing Time

Now more runway than fairway and hailed for its benefits to mind, body and soul, golf is enjoying a resurgence among people from all walks of life –and that’s a golden opportunity for Britain

It was the Rat Pack that first injected a much-needed dose of glamour into the dusty, fusty world of golf. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr enjoyed spending their days gambling on the manicured fairways of Las Vegas and Palm Springs, and their evenings swapping stories and songs around the piano. More recently, though, it’s the rap pack that’s been reshaping perspectives around a sport long regarded as boring, white and middle-aged.

Hip-hop’s appropriation of the royal and ancient game can be traced back to the dawn of the Tiger Woods era. Woods burst onto the global stage with his runaway win in the 1997 Masters Tournament and has dominated golf – on course and off course – ever since. The first man of colour to win one of golf’s four major titles, he is now the owner of 15 of them. Woods single-handedly elevated the sport and despite competing only a few times each year is still the most powerful individual in the entire industry.

Woods stormed the gated world of WASPish American country clubs. It was a culture-changing achievement noted in the 1997 video for the Notorious B.I.G.’s classic Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems, which opened with a skit starring Puff Daddy as a golfer called Puffy Woods and rapper Mase playing a blazered golf commentator. Twelve years later, Woods’ very public fall from grace, sparked by revelations of his numerous extra-marital affairs, provided further grist to the mill for rappers, with Tiger being name-checked in dozens of lyrics.

A cursory Google search reveals just how many golf references in hip-hop culture there now are. But there is more to this than commentary on white, male privilege. Recent National Golf Foundation statistics in the US reveal that in the past three years there has been a 17 per cent rise in people of colour playing golf, as well as a net gain of almost one million juniors (ages six to 17). This growing popularity of the game among previously untapped demographics reveals the huge opportunities that exist for the sport.

The upswing in participation has been seen across all segments of the population, largely driven by the many positive physical and mental health aspects of the game, which found a spotlight during the pandemic. The result is golf now has the chance to redraw or, better still, remove its boundaries.

For the UK, these opportunities are even more pronounced. Not only do we have the highest density of golf courses in the world, we also have the best courses and the oldest and richest golf culture. The first references to the game in Scotland date back to the 15th century, and St Andrews is still universally acknowledged as the home of golf, as well as the seat of the R&A, one of sport’s governing bodies.

Once the quintessential bastion of blazers, the R&A has become an increasingly enlightened force within the sport, and in recent years it has taken positive strides in promoting women’s golf and creating increased opportunity for people from all walks of life to participate. Its well-publicised project to build a new community golf facility in the north-east of Glasgow is evidence of a new broom philosophy that blends respect for tradition with a more progressive approach to finding solutions to three of golf’s biggest problems in the modern age: perceptions of elitism, the time it takes to play and the cost.

The positive by-products of the pandemic have been felt just as keenly in British golf, where participation is up more than 50 per cent on pre-pandemic levels. Golf is now being hailed for its benefits to mind, body and soul, rather than its crimes against fashion. New British golf labels like Sounder (from Cathal McAteer, the founder of Folk) and Manors have introduced a more relaxed aesthetic that mirrors the changing times captured by independent American brands such as Linksoul, Malbon and Bogey Boys, the latter being the brainchild of US rapper Macklemore, no less.

Short courses, which are more inclusive, laid back and far quicker to play, are springing up at leading golf resorts across the US, many designed by the most in-demand course architects. Some leading British venues, like Gleneagles, with its three championship courses and its stunning, nine-hole par-three facility, The Wee Course, have been well ahead of this curve.

This embrace of new players and more accessible formats can help the sport to grow, and among the main catalysts for this thinking are British twin brothers Steve and David Jolliffe, who launched Topgolf in 2000. Topgolf revolutionised the stale driving range experience, transforming it into a fun, interactive lifestyle brand aimed at people who don’t even classify themselves as golfers.

With its consumer-friendly technology, snacks, beverages and music, and smart blend of gaming and game improvement designed for beginners and serious golfers alike, Topgolf has become a lightning rod for the dramatic growth of the off-course sector within golf. So much so that in 2021, Callaway, one of the sport’s leading OEMs, bought Topgolf for $2.6 billion and last year changed its name to Topgolf Callaway Brands Corp. It underlined not only how Callaway sees the sport developing, but how Britain, as the game’s inventors, can still have a major influence on golf’s future.