Golf course glut drives game into bunker

Graham Ogilvy, Scotland on Sunday, 21 December 2003

Picturesque Castle Park Golf Club was described as Stuart Fortune’s "dream business venture" and he worked tirelessly to make the course a success. But the struggling farmer never attracted enough players to the club in Gifford, East Lothian. Two weeks ago the 59-year-old father-of-three took his own life.

His suicide is an extreme and tragic symbol of a problem affecting most of Scotland’s clubs. The disastrous over-provision of courses has forced many to slash membership fees or offer special rates.

As Scotland’s planners have given the green light to new golf projects, with even more in the pipeline, clubs both urban and rural have found themselves in the economic rough, forced to introduce sharp high street sales tactics.

Dunkeld and Birnam Golf Club has dropped its annual membership fee from £250 to just £1. But that still makes Dunkeld £1 more expensive than St Michael’s in Fife, which has scrapped membership fees for its centenary year in a desperate bid to attract new members and fill 28 vacancies.

Crail Golfing Society in the East Neuk of Fife has no waiting list for membership and is offering two for one on a round of golf. Even mighty Gleneagles has no waiting list at the moment, while St Andrews Duke’s Course, which also has no waiting list, is offering free membership of up to five months if golfers sign up now.

VisitScotland boasts that Scotland has 540 golf courses, but the Scottish Golf Union lists 630 courses and a further 63 driving ranges. In the past decade more than 80 new courses have opened in Scotland, but total membership of all clubs has stuck at around 250,000.

It is estimated that half of all Scottish golf clubs have no waiting list and 37% of those that do report waiting lists falling. Richard Barnes, secretary of Dunkeld and Birnam Golf Course, said: "The new courses, with reduced green fees, are taking away a bit from the established courses. Our £1 fee is a one-off. It’s something we have never done in our history, but I think you can safely say it is market forces that have pushed us into that direction."

Outwith the hallowed clubhouses of the R&A, Muirfield, Rosemount, Panmure and a handful of prestigious clubs, waiting lists once legendary for their length have become a distant folk memory.

Nick Holligan, assistant professional at Edinburgh’s Liberton club, whose 18th-century clubhouse was designed by Robert Adam, said: "Five to eight years ago, the waiting list was eight to 10 years. But in January and February this year we cleared the waiting list. It is because of the over provision. There are just more golf courses being built."

John Elvin, secretary of the Merchants of Edinburgh club is equally pessimistic. He said: "Golf isn’t perceived as cool. Almost universally in the east of Scotland we have suffered a drop in the waiting lists.

"Clubs anticipate a 5% natural drop off in membership per year. So if your club has 600 members, 5% is 30 members. So the club would be looking to take in 30- 50 members a year.

"In years gone by you would have a waiting list of 150 - 200 to become members. Now you are struggling to get your replacement 30-50, so there is going to be a gradual erosion of membership.

"The increased number of courses is one factor in falling membership. But it is also because there are so many more leisure activities. Take family membership of health clubs, which is £1,500 - £2,000. People ask themselves do I take part with the family or do I selfishly go and play golf for the same price? The answer is they go and take part with the family."

He added: "There has been an increase in new build courses, many of which have been very successful. There are certain times of the year golf cannot be played on a traditionally built Scottish course. You put in a new course with good quality green and well-drained fairways and these courses are playable."

Last month, a further indication of the scale of the crisis facing Scottish golf came with the formal receivership of the £4.5m Scottish National Golf Centre at Drumoig, outside St Andrews.

Yet fairways and greens keep popping up all over the country, with more than 80 new courses being built north of the Border in the past decade.

The national golf centre had lost more than £1m and failed to attract sufficient customers since it opened in 1999. Its receivership follows the failure of upmarket golf club Letham Grange, in Angus.

A spokesperson for the Scottish Golf Union said: "People don’t have as much time as they used to. Scotland’s population is ageing. There are more car-park golfers who turn up with their stuff in the boot, change, play then leave. The social side, the drinking at the 19th hole, has suffered because of this, and so have the clubs.

"To combat many of these current trends in Scottish golf, the golf union is implementing various measures to attract and develop juniors into the game of golf."

JOIN THE CLUB

In recent years, the top Scottish golf clubs have been able to charge sky-high rates and be choosy with their clientele. In 2000, the waiting-list for the Muirfield Golf Club in Edinburgh stood at seven years.

Some clubs subjected the hopeful mortals clamouring to join them to a vetting process, which sometimes laid bare their private lives and business dealings, as well as their golfing prowess, to the most intrusive scrutiny.

Throughout the ordeal, the view was given that one word or gesture out of place would be all it would take for the application to fail.

Quite apart from the social stigma, rejection also meant that the failed candidate would be cast into golf's outer darkness of municipal driving ranges and pay-to-play courses.

The nightmare of attempting to gain membership of a golf club even became the subject of a Channel Four Cutting Edge documentary, which gave a fly-on-the-wall insight into the system at Northwood club in Middlesex.

In 1999, golfers at the exclusive Loch Lomond Golf Club, on the shores of the famous loch, which offers games among some of Scotland’s most stunning scenery, were asked to limit the number of rounds that they played there each year. The club was so popular that it shut down its Scottish waiting-list and for a time only accepted applications from other parts of the UK and from overseas.