The Past, Present and Future of Golf
June 19, 2018
The game of golf can and does reveal both the good and bad sides of people. Think you might want to hire a person for a job? Then take that person golfing. Observe. If that person can’t count all his or her strokes on a golf course, you can’t count on that person in life.
Golf claims to need and nurture integrity like no other sport. It does not prescribe or require a contest official to observe every action but is designed to be a game where each competitor plays the ball as it is found and counts every attempt to hit it. The rules of golf are without leniency for a player who records an incorrect score yet depend on that player, and no one else, to count all strokes and assess any penalties that add to the score.
As a youngster, I played regularly with my parents. My mother was the club rules chairperson for many years. I was told in no uncertain terms to “play my ball as it lies and tell no lies about my play.”
Golf certainly has its detractors ... for example, its pace is slow and its price is high. But over years, and with enlightenment that arrived too slowly, golf has addressed its worst blind spots and opened its choicest courses and its most chauvinistic hearts to females and minorities. Its recent outreach to youth is marvelous; its ongoing support of charities is magnificent.
A recent controversy over scores posted by a small group of players at a Michigan High School Athletic Association Regional Golf Tournament has caused some local tarnish on this illustrious worldwide game and brought embarrassment to some players and their schools as well as some criticism of the MHSAA. It was alleged that players from more than one team who were assigned to the same competitive groupings colluded to post lower scores than they actually earned. Neither their coaches nor administrators discovered a crack in the players’ stories, or in their solidarity, in spite of repeated questioning. There was no evidence of acts of cheating, but a suspicious anomaly in the players’ scores caused concern at the Regional meet and since.
If there was a conspiracy of cheating, it was the players who are at fault, which must be shared by the adults in their lives who may have been unable to nurture character to the same degree they developed skills.
If the only solution to questions of players’ shaving strokes is adult supervision of every grouping at every Regional of all four Divisions, then the soul of the game and much of what it is supposed to teach is lost, and the time spent on the sport may be unjustifiable. At least that’s what our state golf coaches association argued a decade ago when coaches were granted relief from being assigned to accompany groupings and “observe” players. They said they wanted to coach their own kids and not be required to count the strokes of other players.
Studies in other states have demonstrated that golf is the school sport which, on a per-participant basis, causes students to lose more classroom instructional time than any other sport. It’s played off school grounds and very often with non-faculty coaches. It generates no revenue to offset expenses. Add in dissatisfaction with the court-ordered change of seasons for MHSAA Lower Peninsula golf tournaments 10 years ago — and this recent ugly and, for some, unsettled incident — and one is left with more reasons than not for the MHSAA to discontinue tournament sponsorship of golf.
But I love the sport! I grew up playing golf with my parents and spent hundreds more hours with them than my siblings who did not play the game. I had a few great rounds when I was a youngster and eventually settled on the goal of being among the 10 percent of all golfers who break 90. I love the colors and contours of challenging courses, which in my prime I preferred to play at their full length, from the toughest tees and with no “gimmies” on the greens. I now watch more golf on television than any other sport.
I’ve been thinking a lot about golf over the past decade, but have found little traction when talking about changing traditions of high school golf in Michigan ... for example, in favor of a Ryder Cup style team tournament — perhaps even coed — conducted in both Spring and Fall where schools (or their leagues) choose the season that fits their needs best. While the NCAA still conducts a Spring championship, it has “modernized” its tournament with match play, and television ratings reveal broader public appeal for the team format that professional players seem to relish. Might we make some changes to modernize high school competition in this state?
This tradition-soaked sport needs to be energized, not eliminated at the high school level. Most of all, it needs to be introduced earlier in rural and urban junior high/middle schools to create the interest and cultivate the skill that will lead to larger and more stable high school golf programs.
Committees Fail Critical Issues
June 7, 2013
Typically, each sport committee meets once each year for three to five hours, during which time it considers proposals that come from schools, leagues and the state’s coaches association for the sport; and the proposals most often deal with allowing more regular-season events and more qualifiers to the MHSAA postseason tournament.
Occasionally there is a proposal that might improve sportsmanship. But much more often the proposals would increase conflicts between academics and athletics and/or strain overstressed local budgets. And almost never is there a proposal that would address the health and safety of participants (the Wrestling Committee has been an occasional exception and the Competitive Cheer Committee is a routine exception).
While coaches associations must shoulder some of the blame because they’ve brought MHSAA committees “trivial” topics, at least in comparison to the tougher health and safety topics, much of the cause of MHSAA committee ineffectiveness is that the committees don’t meet long enough or often enough to research serious problems and develop well-thought-out solutions. That is forgivable because it is difficult to get commitments from busy people all across Michigan to be absent from their regular jobs and travel dozens or even hundreds of miles, and to do so multiple times each year – which is what it takes to more fully understand complex problems and more carefully construct solutions. Meetings have to be few and they have to be efficient.
However, facing the worst publicity football has seen since the mid-1970s, we knew we had to supplement the football committee process. We did so by appointing a special Football Task Force of optimum size and experienced, representative makeup to meet on however many occasions are necessary during 2013 to accomplish three purposes:
- Review practice policies to improve acclimatization of players and reduce head trauma.
- Review competition rules to reduce head trauma and the frequency of the sport’s most injurious game situations.
- Develop promotions that extol the value of football to students, schools and communities and the safety record of school-based football.
The promotional efforts have begun to be rolled out; game rule modifications are being investigated; and four proposals for changing football practice policies have been prepared. They will be the topic of our next posting.