Greg Norman has followed in the footsteps of Lee Westwood in calling for a complete overhaul of the way golf is played in order to address the large drop in participation over the last few years.
The two-time Open champion has called for shorter courses, a relaxation of dress codes and for buggies to be able to play music.
England lost more than 400,000 monthly golfers between 2008 and 2015 while in Norman’s native Australia more than half of all the golf clubs now have 100 members or less.
“Bring the kids in by letting them put speakers in golf carts, putting headsets on or playing in their board shorts or getting on an electric skateboard or something like that to take their clubs around, have fun with the game, speed it up, do what the kids like to do,” said Greg Norman.
“I’m a big proponent of increasing the speed of the game. Building 12-hole golf courses, reducing the time. Why do we have to build these 7,000 metre long golf courses for maybe one week a year or not even one week when the cost of constructing and maintaining these ridiculous clubhouses gets out of hand. We’ve really got to get our crap together.”
“[Progress] is like Chinese water torture, drip, drip, drip, but you only need to do a couple of successful [12-hole courses] and people will sit up and take notice. Don’t throw a big wet blanket over the rest of the game of golf just because that’s what the younger generation want to do.”
Norman likened golf clubs’ resistance to change to that of ski resorts.
“When snowboarding became popular, ski resorts resisted and resisted and resisted, and what happened was families wouldn’t come because their kids couldn’t snowboard, so the resorts were cutting off their nose to spite their face because they weren’t reaching down to the millennials – you have got to listen to what these kids do,” he said.
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