Links Golf and Soccer Have the Same Problem in America

It's often said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but on the other side, it's also possible to have too much of a good thing. I mean, if you ate your favorite food every day, would it still be your favorite food?

In my case, I've experimented with this and have yet to get tired of pizza, but that could also be an isolated case.

I bring this up because every year around this time, we as the collective North American golf-watching population, get to watch the best players in the world play what is, in my opinion, the best type of golf in the world: links golf.

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And, every year, we hear about how much the players love it and how creative they get to be, and they wish they could play it a bit more often. Then, it goes away, and we repeat the cycle in 12 months.

It's this same vicious cycle that permeates soccer and the current World Cup in North America. The general sports-watching population generally ignores soccer (yes, it's still popular, but not like the other major sports leagues), yet we get whipped up into a frenzy come tournament time. Then, as fast as the event arrived, after the final whistle we go back to the same things that we did before.

Think pieces get written about why soccer isn't as popular, and pundits argue about why the development system in North America lags so far behind much of the world, even when the population is so much larger.

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In the golf world, beyond watching it on television, this occurs another way: when North American golfers eventually take the pilgrimage to Scotland, and come back asking themselves,

Why can't we have it more like that here?

For some reason, we saw a great thing and admired its system of affordability, access, as well as simple strategy, and said - yeah, but we can probably do it better. And instead, we ruined it, and stand here now looking at the system we've created like George Taylor (Charlton Heston's character), in "Planet of the Apes" (the original, of course), with the full understanding that we could have done better, but have gone too far, with no way of fixing it.

You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!

Now of course, this is a bleak way of looking at what golf has generally become in North America, but it has clearly become a two-tier system. The majority of options are either unaffordable daily fee courses and private country clubs, or overcrowded public courses that are affordable, but lack the investment to live up to their much greater potential.

The middle ground only tends to be found farther away from central populations, where access meets affordability and a greater variety of options.

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We might not be able to fix golf in North America, but at the professional level, there is an opportunity for the best players in the world to play more links golf; it simply requires a commitment from the PGA TOUR and its players to become a more global entity. Why not have a full month of links golf events leading up to The Open, or even after?

Part of the summer schedule could be filled with the tour playing links golf in the UK, with a rotation of courses that showcase different varieties of links golf. This would shift the tour away from many parts of the country that have less-than-ideal conditions for professional golf during the heat of summer, and introduce more people to the style of links golf. And, from a travel perspective, it would allow players to set up a longer-term base during this time.

It might also help more golfers in North America understand that the game was never originally intended to be played on perfectly lush surfaces. Golf courses don't need to look like someone rolled out a green carpet to be considered great. They can be baked out, brown, fast, and maybe sometimes a little unfair by nature because it was nature that designed the original courses in the first place.

The (rather cheesy) saying is that travel is the one thing you spend money on that makes you richer, and in the case of golf, greater exposure to the game away from our North Americanized version can help us gain a greater appreciation for the variety that is truly available. Just like pizza, there are a lot of ways to make one, you just need to try it.

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