John Huggan: Scottish golf should look at itself before playing blame game

SCOTTISH golf is blaming all kinds of things for a decline in membership, but clubs should take a look in their own overgrown back yard first

Just the other day, the Scottish Golf Union, in the shape of chief executive Hamish Grey, made a rather bleak announcement. According to figures just in, golf club membership in the land that gave the game to the world has been falling, is falling and will continue to fall for at least another two years. Next stop Armageddon?

A few factors, at least in Grey’s mind, share the bulk of the responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. There’s the current state of the economy. There’s over-capacity as a result of too much course construction during the now almost forgotten building-boom that existed before the bankers caused the world to fall apart. And there’s our weather. After centuries of coping nicely with the Caledonian climate, our golfers have, according to Grey, suddenly had enough of wrapping up warmly on the links.

One thing that wasn’t mentioned, however, was the strong possibility that, right this minute and for a depressingly large percentage of participants, golf just isn’t as much fun as it used to be. Think about it. Over the last 15 years or so, a huge number of courses have been lengthened and/or “toughened” in vain and invariably unnecessary attempts to stay “current” in the face of technologically-enhanced club golfers who are supposedly hitting the ball farther than ever before.

The real truth, of course, is that, while the most talented among us have certainly gained much yardage from the high-powered combination of turbo-charged balls and frying-pan drivers, the vast majority are playing pretty much the same game we’ve always played. Only now we are taking up to an hour longer to play it on courses that are all too often longer and narrower. And guess what? Faced with more searching for balls and more hacking out of thoughtlessly long rough, more of us are deciding that 18 holes of golf take too much time and aren’t that enjoyable anyway.

So it is that, by confusing “difficult” with “interesting” and/or “stimulating”, club committees across this great nation must take their share of the blame for the current “crisis”. Their collective ignorance of the game they all surely claim to love has been devastating. But it’s a problem easily solved. Cut the grass and move the tees up. There you go. Fixed.

He’s teasing us again, as he has done so often before. Stephen Gallacher, I mean. Just last week the 37-year old Bathgate man recorded his second second-place finish in this still young European Tour season. As a result, he’s up to twelfth place in the “Race to Dubai” and to eighty-second spot on the world-ranking list. Not bad, not bad at all.

The trouble is, that last number is about 50 higher than it should be. It is simply a nonsense that Gallacher, one of the great under-achievers in the modern game, does not at this point in his career own at least a dozen European Tour titles and maybe three Ryder Cup caps. He’s that good. And he’s been that good for a while now.

In fact, he’s better than good. In a quarter century of watching professional golf for a living, this observer has yet to see as many as 20 players who strike the ball with more authority and purity than this eternally amiable Scot. It is still easy to recall the look of bemusement on the face of three-time major champion Ernie Els when Gallacher, pictured, won his first – and still only – European Tour event, the 2004 Dunhill Links Championship. “That’s his first win?” said the big South African. “You’ve got to be joking.”

Many are the theories that attempt to explain the mystery that is Stephen Gallacher. Some maintain he is “too nice” to be the hard-nosed competitor you need to be at the game’s sharpest end. There is some merit to that. His perennially frustrating putting also gets its share of the blame. And that too has some legitimacy.

If only there was a way of blending the beautiful ball striking of Stephen with the grit and short game of his uncle Bernard. My goodness, what a player we’d have then.

Perhaps the most head-shakingly downbeat news of the last week was the revelation – at least to this reporter – that competitors in Scottish Golf Union events are now being allowed to use those mechanical yardage gizmos. The excuse is that they will help speed up the overall pace of play from funereal to merely insufferably slow. But of course they don’t do anything of the sort. On the basis of anecdotal evidence reported in a variety of sources last week, the lads playing in the Scottish Boys Championship were just as lackadaisical as ever.

So, given that they changed nothing in terms of how long it took these stars of the future to hit even the most straightforward shot, what is the justification for these abominations? There is none, of course. Long ago, the late, great Ben Hogan was asked how far he hit his 5-iron. To which the “Hawk” merely shook his head in disbelief at the inherent ignorance of the question. “Where is the wind coming from?” he responded. “How strong is it? How firm is the turf? What shape of shot is called for? I must know all of those things before I can make a decision on what club to play.”

In other words, when played properly, there is so much more to golf than numbers on a card or, heaven forbid, a small hand-held screen. Yet again, those that purport to run our game at the national level have got it horribly wrong.

The computerised and sometimes hard to fathom compilation of the world-ranking list has long been something of an irritant to many. And so it was again last week. What set the critics off this time was the inactive route US Open champion Rory McIlroy, below, took back to number one. The young Ulsterman, courtesy of Luke Donald’s failure to finish in at least a tie for eighth at Hilton Head and his own decision not to play anywhere, is back atop the game’s most contentious mountain.

Still, for all that such anomalies do seem to pop up on a regular basis, it’s hard to get too worked up about this. The rankings, while not perfect, have reached a stage where they are a pretty fair reflection of reality and so represent a sound comparison between the game’s leading lights. You can argue about this-and-that here-and-there, but all in all, that’s just nitpicking.

Besides, the most interesting and important aspect of the world rankings is not the top-one or two but the top 50. Most of the time that is something of a closed shop. Indeed, once a player makes his way into the leading two-score-and-ten he has to play more than badly to make good his escape. All because the man at 50 is eligible for all four majors and every World Golf Championship – the events that carry the most ranking points – and number 51 is not. Is this a problem? No. It is simply the way that it is. So if anyone outside the top 50 has a complaint, the proper response is straightforward – play better.