The game was actually given a global shot in the arm by Covid-19. People realised what should have been obvious to Andrews: you don’t get sick playing golf in the open air.
Golf Australia on December 18 released the sport’s five-year results: a record 3.8 million Australians played golf in 2023-24. Participation rose 9 per cent, and 19 per cent of all adults played at least one round across that 12-month period.
This column plays golf three times a week – either in Sydney or at Kew on the NSW mid-north coast – and has noticed a rise in school-age students playing late afternoons. Junior participation last year rose 33.4 per cent (37.3 per cent for boys and 13.8 per cent for girls).
Yet public golf, the foundation stone of the game nationally, is under threat.
Golf Australia says as many as 50 courses nationally face pressure from community groups wanting open public space at golf courses.
Moore Park, Sydney’s 18-hole city public course, may be halved to nine holes next year after years of campaigning by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who lives in nearby East Redfern and owns property in the area.
The Minns Labor state government has conducted extensive public consultation – most of which supported the status quo – but has budgeted to start work on plans to turn 20 of the course’s 45 hectares into a park.
The Save Moore Park organisation has delivered an alternative that keeps 18 holes but reduces the course to a par 68 and offers 15 hectares of extra public space, parking, bikeways, skate park, BMX track, fitness trail, dog park and minigolf for children.
James O’Doherty in The Daily Telegraph on Friday reported the government had been warned the original plan might be far more expensive than imagined.
The compromise 18-hole option would certainly guarantee much of the $16m a year flowing from golf activities at Moore Park would continue to help finance the Greater Sydney Parklands portfolio.
Moore Park, gazetted in 1913 as the city’s workers club, is visited by 500,000 people a year, 82 per cent of whom live within 10km of the club. Many rely on public transport to access the course.
It is at the western end of 360 hectares of parklands including Centennial Park, Queens Park and the wider Moore Park grounds.
The Warringah course on the city’s northern beaches fought for years to resist a push to turn the city’s second busiest course into public open space.
Chatswood on Sydney’s north shore is being reduced to 12 holes.
In Melbourne, Darebin Council in 2022 voted to retain the Northcote course for golf after a push for it to be opened to public recreation after 3pm daily or all day Sunday.
Last year, Monash Council voted to keep the nine-hole Oakleigh Course after a push to turn the course into parkland.
Brisbane’s inner city 18-hole Victoria Park Golf Course closed in 2021 after 90 years.
The Elsternwick nine-hole course in Melbourne’s Bayside Council area closed in 2018 and was turned over to wetlands. Rosny Park Public Golf Course in Hobart closed – at least temporarily – in 2021, although no final decision appears to have been reached on the future of its land on the eastern shore of the Derwent River.
The shift to inner urban areas by young families is putting pressure on public open space, as have urban projects turning old industrial areas into modern developments.
Yet property developers in the outer areas of our big cities are required to allocate land for recreational purposes. Golfers wonder why big urban renewal projects in Sydney’s inner south are not similarly required to keep open land for recreation.
Jared Kendler, a golfer from inner-Sydney Surry Hills and campaigner for the Save Moore Park Golf Course group, makes the point.
“Local councils are often ill-informed about golf’s popularity and overall benefits to the community. Public golf courses just become an easy way for them to make a land grab to make up for poor planning decisions,” he said.
Much of the campaign against golf is driven by the idea it is an elite sport – yet it is not the elite private clubs that are being targeted because they own their own land.
Public courses do not require club membership and nine holes can cost about $27.
This newspaper’s Saturday columnist Nikki Gemmell triggered a storm when she wrote about golf in 2021, arguing public land would be better used as open space for children rather than the old men she argued receive all the benefits of golf.
Children do need open space. But there are counter-arguments in favour of public golf.
Lifelong ratepayers who access public golf are in effect being asked to sacrifice facilities so that people who have only recently moved into new higher-density developments can access open space that councils did not demand developers provide.
When Sydney’s old Manly Council – now part of the merged Northern Beaches Council – targeted Warringah public course for open recreational space, many critics of golf pointed to the nearby Manly course as an alternative. But Manly is private, and membership is very expensive.
Most people who use the Warringah course are locals, including many women and teenagers.
Club professional Rob Richards says golf is misrepresented as an elite sport for older men.
He says while about 40 per cent of players at the course are over 55, about 25 per cent would be under 30.
Richards says new players “anchor their golf at Warringah”. Indeed, even if new players could afford to play on a private course it is hard to see how most could justify such a financial commitment early in their time with such a difficult sport.
Says Kendler: “I use the example of Jason Day. He is one of the world’s best pro golfers but he started out playing with a club his dad found at the tip.”
Day, who has won 13 US tournaments, has often spoken about how he was introduced to the sport as a three-year-old in Beaudesert, south of Brisbane, with a three wood his father picked up at the dump.
He formally joined the Beaudesert public course as a junior, aged six, and turned professional in 2006 at age 19. He won the US PGA in 2015 and has held the world No.1 ranking. He has won 19 tournament in the US, Europe and Australia.
Warringah’s Richards says golf also teaches life skills: “It requires dedication, training, learning in a social environment with a strong tilt towards rules and behaviour.”
Adds Kendler: “Golf courses are melting pots that bring together people of all ages, genders and backgrounds.
“ In what other sport do you see a 12-year-old spending four and a half hours with a 70-year-old engaging in meaningful conversations and learning life lessons while focusing on a game, (and) away from mobile phones?’’
Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer summed up the sport: “Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and challenges the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening – and it is without doubt the greatest game mankind has invented.”
What a tragedy it would be if it became a sport only for the rich.
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