I guess I shouldn’t be writing this.

Who needs to be reminded of the times we are in? Heck, who wants to be reminded of the times we are in…

The recent and present economic implosion has caught us all in a bind. How do we supposed to react to the state of the world economy with lay-offs and factory shut-downs and deep financial losses everywhere?

The good, booming times are gone. They will be back, of course. Maybe next year, maybe a few years from now, maybe we are in for a long wait. But the optimist in us needs to prevail. It has to if we have any intentions of surviving.

In the meantime, what is there to do?

The Philippines seems better off than other countries and there are even projections of modest growth. Why this is so appears to be a mystery. Perhaps it is because we have been so used to the bottom that the only way to go is up. Or maybe we have become so used to having a bad economy, a bad government and eternally pessimistic outlooks that nothing surprises us anymore.

That is the greater concern. It is the problems that our golfing industry now faces — that’s what we should be particularly worried about.

As I have always said, golf is a creature of the economy. As the economy goes, so does the game of golf. Good economic times mean a growing golf industry, a weak and falling economy presages gloomy and problematic days ahead.

The world economy is in terrible shape and we need to be able to come to terms with what is before us. The sooner we do so, the better for everyone who loves the game.

For so many years a lot of golf courses (specially the new ones) in the country have depended upon the yearly influx of Korean golfers for their survival. Unfortunately, that well has just about dried up. With the sudden devaluation of the Korean Won vis-a-vis the US Dollar, golf tourism from that part of the world has come to a screeching halt.

The loss of this income will certainly have a huge impact on the maintenance and budgets and employment of these clubs. While there have been reports of golf courses closing in the United States, we really hope this does not happen here since a lot of our new courses have been in existence for only 10 years or so.

The new courses are the most vulnerable because they have not developed a membership base that will be able to pay for the maintenance of the golf course from usage and monthly dues. It would be a simple (but perhaps unpopular) matter for the old, established clubs to simply raise monthly dues to pay for the upkeep of their clubs. That would take care of a lot of problems. And truth is these clubs weren’t dependent upon tourist income in the first place.

It would be such a waste if these courses closed so early in their existence. But what can be done about this?

Short of us passing around the hat for these clubs, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we made an effort to play one of them at least once a month. I’m sure that a lot of these courses have relaxed their guest acceptance policies and could even be giving discounts on green fees. Some of them have even opened their members’ monthly tournaments to guests so the air of welcome, acceptance and accommodation is out there.

Whether we realize or accept it or not, we are in this together. The industry is headed for dire straits and the future without us golfers sticking together will be a lot gloomier than we can ever imagine.

Golf in our country is being threatened by a lot of things aside from the tourist income issue. There is the generation gap that sees mostly grandfathers and grandchildren being the active golfers today, there is the taxation issue that cash-strapped local governments seem to be pushing hard to implement and there are the ever-increasing issues on the environment that we need to address like water-usage on our courses.

Never in the past have these issues affected us so much. During the good times they may have been overlooked and flippantly dealt with. Now they are here to confront us in the midst of the rest of our troubles.

Is making an effort to support our industry too much to ask in the midst of all our problems? Maybe.

But the key word is effort. Just make an effort. It may not be today or tomorrow but the next time you and your golfing friends have the time and the cash to spare, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to think of playing a course that really needs your business.

“Ideas were not meant to travel on a one-way street.” - buddy_res@yahoo.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under As I Tee It. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.