OCT 29, 2008-JOHN HUGGAN of SCOT on SUNDAY SAYS GOLF NEEDS VARIETY and LEADERSHIP

What Up Peoples around the world!?!
Hope you are all fantastic.

Today, we are going to look at Leading European Golf Writer, John Huggan's article in THE SCOTLAND on SUNDAY.
This will be a very tremendous look at the current issues holding golf back from maximizing its appeal to a broader demographic.

Huggan calls for Shape Shooters and Innovation.

Here we go....

Let the party begin.

As always, click on The Title of The Blog to see a video of Huggan speaking about the 2008 US OPEN.

SCOT on SUNDAY
HUGGAN: GAME's UP UNLESS GOLF FINDS THE BALLS TO ENCOURAGE SHOT-SHAPERS

Published Date: 19 October 2008

By John Huggan

IT IS a hard fact of golfing life that sometimes the game at the highest level just isn't very interesting. Look at the PGA Tour now that the "excitement" of the "Fed-Up Cup" is over. Thankfully, there are exceptions. One reason why the Ryder and Solheim Cups are so eagerly awaited is that both are breaks from the mind-numbing tedium that is yet another 72-hole stroke-play event.

Of course, the unspoken realisation that card-and-pencil golf is inherently dull – stroke play only becomes watchable when it is magically transformed into match play on Sunday afternoons – is the biggest motivation behind the so-far failed Fed-Ex Cup
series and the European Tour's new-fangled 'Race for Dubai' that will start in China next month.

Both circuits know deep down that the only way to make their product really appealing to the public is through easily identifiable winners and losers. Bland, four-round, add-up-your-score tournaments too often fail to provide the latter. While a champ is routinely identified, there are no real chumps when everyone goes home with a cheque.

Still, protection of a perennial loser's precious ego is not the biggest reason why the world's tours have not broken away more often from the almost never-ending 72-hole routine. As usual in these circumstances, the root of that reluctance for change is money, specifically the cash poured in by television companies. Television hates match play. Not only is there no guarantee of how long each match is going to last, the potential for shock results is ever-present. No matter how well played, finals fought out between players not named Woods or Mickelson are of little interest to the likes of NBC and Sky.

Which is why the PGA and European Tours, recognising the inherent blandness of stroke play, use ridiculously overblown prize funds to distract the public from seeing through harebrained schemes that attempt the almost impossible: retaining simple addition as the measurement of success and failure within a format that does as much as it can to distance itself from that basic requirement. As the abject failure of the Fed-Ex play-off thingy has shown, however, this is no easy task.

There have been plenty of alternative suggestions, of course, perhaps the best of which proposes a four-round tournament to decide the season-long points-race winners, then a one-round, winner-take-all shoot-out for the big bucks for the top eight.

Then again, all of the above can easily be dismissed as the golfing equivalent of violin-playing on the deck of the Titanic: it may make those involved feel better in the short term but it does nothing to alter their inevitable and inexorable fate. So it is that, if professional golf is to survive and thrive as a spectator sport for the masses, changes need to be made at the macro rather than micro level.

A question: why is it that what should be an endlessly fascinating sport, played on a huge variety of endlessly fascinating sites, has apparently become less and less interesting over the last 25 years ?

A response: could it be that the style of play employed and shots struck by the most able practitioners have become increasingly one-dimensional? Does anyone really want to watch yet another high, straight shot?

And another: could it be that those endlessly fascinating sites are now routinely presented in such a uniform way that the style of play employed by the most able practitioners has, through no fault of their own, become more and more predictable?

The real answers to those questions, surely, are obvious.

Until something is done about the extraordinary distances the modern golf ball flies when struck by an elite player, then the game at that level is doomed to be ever more pedestrian.

Until something is done to allow elite players to more readily shape shots from right-to-left and left-to-right as the likes of Lee Trevino and Seve Ballesteros used to do, then we are doomed to watching practically every player hit basically the same shot time after tedious time.

And while the thoughts of golfers the world over are with Ballesteros as he lies in a Madrid hospital following surgery to remove a brain tumour, the most exciting golfer in living memory is just one who has expressed fears for the future of the game he loves.

"I see good swings and good players," said Seve. "But nothing that really keeps me watching television for a long time.

"Everybody has been equalised by the new clubs, the long putter, more loft on wedges. Something has to be done with the rules, otherwise golf will become more power than anything else."

He is right, of course. Until some imagination and flair is consistently injected into the presentation of the golf courses used for professional events – the recent Ryder Cup at Valhalla was a perfect example of how even a mediocre course set up properly can allow top players at least a chance to express themselves – then we are doomed to watch even the most creative individuals hacking out of long grass that exists only because of the aforementioned ball.

So, next time you sit in front of the box bored silly by a tournament that looks remarkably like the one you watched last week and the one you will watch next week, you'll at least know why it has all gone so horribly wrong. Not that such knowledge is much consolation as you battle to keep your eyes open.