Nick Rodger: Clouds gathering again with course closures after Covid silver lining

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what a regular bar fly down at my local burped to me as he read last week’s column while I was perched next to him with my Cinzano Bianco and a pickled egg.

He’d already hoovered up six pints with nonchalant ease, but the back page of the Tuesday sports supplement was clearly too much to stomach.

Here in the Scottish golf scene, meanwhile, the news of a couple of club closures recently has been hard to digest too. The Hirsel in Coldstream and Torrance Park near Motherwell both announced that the shutters would be coming down.

It appears that the harsh natural cull, delayed in many quarters by the unlikely boost golf clubs were given by the spike in participation during the Covid pandemic, has resumed.

It was probably always going to happen. In those locked down days, when various activities and pursuits were placed under house arrest, golf became the pastime of the pandemic as all and sundry raced to their nearest course in the same stampede of enthusiasm you now get when Labour ministers hear that there’s a freebie going.

The clouds of Covid had a silver lining for many clubs, particularly for those ones that had been eking out the kind of hand-to-mouth existence that would’ve even had Oliver Twist saying, “there you go, take some of mine.”

Tee-sheets were overflowing and memberships ballooned amid the stifling restrictions of the time.

Normality, of course, would eventually return, accompanied by the cheery onset of a cost-of-living crisis. In a saturated market, something has to give.

One of the industry experts this correspondent has occasional chinwags with is the estimable Kevin Fish, who regularly conducts surveys, gathers data, crunches numbers and logs feedback from a vast cross section of golf club managers and secretaries.

At the start of last season, his findings suggested that the average resignation rate of members at clubs was running at six per cent. “Back to the level golf was experiencing before the pandemic struck,” he said of this return to a “familiar slippery slope golf has been on since the turn of the century.”

Where will that slope take us all? Hopefully not off the edge of a bloomin cliff. Given the way the cost of just about everything is going, as well as the weather patterns which now make the height of our golfing season utterly miserable, I reckon that in, oh, 10 to 15 years’ time, there will be only about a dozen golf courses and clubs left in Scotland and they’ll all be charging £5000 for nine holes. I’m being outrageously flippant here.

Plenty of clubs, of course, are flourishing and the demise of one or two tends to lead to apocalyptic headlines about a doom-laden domino effect. Simple demographics and numbers told us to brace ourselves for a flood of imminent golf club closures about 20 years ago. But it’s actually been more of a trickle. Will the next few years see that flood? Time, as always, will tell.

The varied issues and problems facing certain clubs are not new and the warnings that were made years ago are still being made today; time and cost, the ticking bomb of an increasingly elderly membership, a lack of women and girls, a need to engage with the young and attract families, a requirement for more flexible membership packages.

Yet forward thinking and innovation doesn’t always work. Even as far back as 2015, when Blairbeth closed its doors, the club offered local school children the chance to join for an annual fee of just £50 as part of a fresh recruitment drive. Unfortunately, not one person took up the opportunity.

Here in 2024, golf and golfers continue to evolve. During his state of the nation address on the eve of July’s Open, Martin Slumbers, the outgoing chief executive of The R&A, said that, “golf is riding on the crest of the wave”, and stated that “more than 100 million people experience the game in one form or another around the world.”

Driving ranges, simulators and high-tech golf entertainment facilities offer a fast-paced, gamified alternative to the traditional green-grass offerings.

Meanwhile, Scottish Golf’s OpenPlay scheme has been devised for casual golfers who don’t want to commit to a club membership but still want to obtain a handicap and play in a way that suits their lifestyle.

Critics of the initiative have grumbled that these nomads don’t contribute to competitions or clubhouse takings. Others say they have managed to lure OpenPlay golfers into taking up actual club memberships. There are always two sides to a story.

Amid societal shifts and changing habits, when people are spending their leisure time and their money differently, golf clubs are being urged to be more than just, well, golf clubs.

It’s not easy trying to be a come all ye community hub, though. Just look at the dwindling fortunes of pubs, social clubs or churches? A sair fecht, indeed.

Many golf clubs are thriving. Others, though, are barely surviving. And on that sobering note, I’m off to the local for a Cinzano. If it’s still open?