KEY POINTS:
The recent study by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden which found that playing golf adds an extra five years to your life could not have come at a better time for a couple of Zealand Golf officials.
Tomorrow, chief executive Bill MacGowan and commercial manager Dean Murphy make
the opening presentation of a nationwide roadshow, fronting the first ever serious effort by Head Office to increase club membership - and now at the same time producing a healthier population.
MacGowan and Murphy will be in Whangarei tomorrow night, at the North Shore Club on Tuesday and in the Manukau clubhouse on Wednesday night, starting the campaign to sign up at least a quarter of the country's clubs to their Golf Nation concept.
As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, club membership in New Zealand has been declining for years, while the numbers who play casually remain consistently large. So clubs, which provide the vast majority of the actual golf courses, have a huge potential market for new members, if they can get them on the books.
Being a member of a Golf Nation club will offer extra value. There'll be the opportunity to play at other clubs for a much reduced green fee and sometimes for no charge at all.
A Golf Nation club will offer concession rates for two friends to join a club, sometimes with two memberships for the price of one.
There'll be introductory lessons on technique and golf etiquette for those joining up for the first time and there's likely to be some serious relaxation of the game's stuffy dress code.
If you think that's a bridge too far for some clubs, consider this: Royal Wellington, no less, now allows you to play with your shirt untucked and your socks at any height.
These presentations will be at various clubs all over the country during July. Then New Zealand Golf hope to have between 80-100 of them on board in the Golf Nation programme by the end of August.
During July there will be Golf Nation presentations to clubs all over the country. Then, come October, when the weather is better, the days are longer and people start to feel like playing golf again, there'll be a concentrated advertising and promotional campaign all over the country targeting those 350,000 casual golfing non-members.
The other side of the equation is that, if you keep on as a casual green-fee player, you may find your fees will rise significantly.
This is the model operating in Sweden. Although the country is under snow for six months of the year, it is has one of the highest participation rates for golf anywhere in the world.
The key to that participation is being a club member - it's extremely difficult to play in Sweden unless you join up.
And the fruits of such large membership numbers (around 500,000 from a population of 9 million - proportionally twice that of New Zealand) for Sweden are the number of high-quality professional players produced and the consistent success of their juniors in international events.
I find it unsurprising that golfers live longer. The health benefits are pretty obvious. But there are a few clubs which will hear the death rattle unless they take some serious action.
