I play a dying sport and don’t even know it? Hmmm. This is the sort of silliness one hears periodically. Truth is, golf is fine. What really happened is that the Tiger Woods boom era came to an end, as it inevitably would. The economic collapse did not help. There is no doubt that course building went crazy during the last two decades. Houston, like many major urban areas, ended up with an oversupply. It’s just a business cycle. But it’s not as if they all went belly-up. Arrows go up, arrows go down. Equipment sales, likewise, suffered from an explosion of R&D and the determination of some major companies to believe that the right business model was based on marketing and constant “newness.” The availability of cheap Chinese-based manufacturing made such an approach easy to buy into. There is a glut of golf stuff like never before. None of this means the sport is dying.

There are issues, to be sure. But is there a more popular individual sport? If golf is dying, tennis is stone-cold dead. That sport was a huge deal when I was young. Now you can’t find five people in 100 who can name 10 professional players. Or even five. Times change. America today is a banquet of choice. We can listen to 100 or more radio stations catering to every niche. Same with TV. The sports menu has multiplied as well, and those of the X Games variety also have claimed a chunk of the country’s youth. No particular sport will dominate when it comes to participation, but naturally team sports tend to draw the most interest for obvious reasons, starting with the desire of parents to get their kids involved in healthy group activities. But anyone who thinks that golf is the preserve of the affluent elderly white male should walk out to a golf course and see who’s there. They would be surprised. They also will find that the majority of these courses are filled with people. They don’t look like cemeteries. (Or tennis courts.) Rare was the woman a couple generations back who knew much of anything about golf. Now you have millions of girls playing, a fair portion hoping to get college scholarships. There was one from around here who had that exact dream. Nobody told her the sport would soon be dead. Good thing. Otherwise Stacy Lewis might not be the top-ranked player in the world.

Click here for full story and source