 US bailout rescue plan could drive investors to crazy course
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-07 08:10
Fritz Sorensen pulls the ripcord on his golden parachute as the bartender below pours him a glass of breakfast Champagne. "It's always a pleasure to jump into a golf course," the professional skydiver says, moments after completing a 5,000-foot plunge on to the clubhouse roof to inaugurate the $450 million Luebker Golf Resort in the Danish farming village of Nimtofte. "I don't know a better way to start a round with confidence," Sorensen adds. Golf-industry analysts, though, have the jitters that the Sorensen method is about to roll the way of the Haskell guma-core golf ball. Provisions in the $700 billion financial-industry rescue plan that the US House of Representatives passed on Oct 3 include pay limits on executives whose companies tap federal aid. They also prohibit tax deductions for officials that exceed $500,000 and enforce "clawbacks" of cash already paid out to more than a few Wall Street foursomes. For the high-rolling corporate golfers who play on some 9,000 private and public golf courses registered with the United States Golf Association, fallout from the legislation contains more hobgoblins than a triple bogey. According to the most recent data compiled by the non-profit industry group Golf 20/20 in St. Augustine, Florida, as much as 55 percent of the $76 billion-a-year game in 2005 looks to have come from the corporate sector, including $18 billion generated by hospitality. Real challenges "Many private clubs are now facing revenue issues and stagnant growth," says Chris Wightman, a USGA managing director in Far Hills, New Jersey. "The current state of the economy will have a further impact, no doubt." Professional Golf Association Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem says the game is mired in "real challenges" as tournament sponsors such as Wachovia Corp and Morgan Stanley continue to grapple with cash-flow woes. "If we have an additional downturn, the situation might be different," Finchem says. "But right now we can absorb a certain amount of fallout if it were to happen." One man advocating a new model to keep golf alive in a time of less is Steve Hix, president of the MGAUS. That's the Miniature Golf Association United States in Fort Worth, Texas, the rulemaking body for the game that steamship magnate James Barber concocted in 1916 on his estate in Pinehurst, North Carolina. "Any hole longer than 50 feet is way too much," Hix says of the competition formally known as Lilliputian Golf. "Long yardage frustrates players and increases the price of the dirt you need to build on. It's a low-investment, high-return golf game invented by a rich fellow for people who can't afford a country club." Myopic duffers Hix says miniature golf reached its zenith during the Great Depression. It was a time when Americans constructed some 50,000 goofy courses to meet the demands of impoverished linksters reeling from closures, cutbacks or disrepair at many of the country's 4,500 country clubs, such as Myopia Links in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, so named because the founding members were nearsighted. Although statistics on precisely how many private courses shut down are as hard to score as shooting an eagle at Augusta National, golf historian James Hilty at Talamore Country Club in Ambler, Pennsylvania, says the country-club game took a beating when more than 6,000 banks collapsed between 1932 and 1933. "Hundreds of clubs failed," Hilty says. "In the mid-1990s, a new golf course opened almost every day of the year to cater to core-level golfers who played 25 or more rounds annually," Wightman adds. "Golfers are now working 24 hours a day, seven days a week and there are real problems in finding the time to get to the course." Cartoon golfer Hix reckons passage of the $700 billion financial-rescue package will signal a renaissance for what purists call the Tom Thumb game. Indeed, one newspaper cartoon shortly before the stock-market crash of 1929 shows Uncle Sam hoisting a miniature golfer on his shoulders to support a business with the ability to help the economy recover. With only 6,000 miniature-golf courses currently operating in the US, along with a further 24,000 elsewhere in the world, Hix says his industry is more than wistfully prepared to embrace the 27 million American golfers who play by USGA rules. "Subprime's impact on land values really doesn't need to curtail miniature-golf construction," Hix says. "Thousands of Lilliputian golf courses were built on the roofs of apartments throughout America during the Depression, so many in New York that the city actually passed an ordinance forbidding construction." For Hix, the economic meltdown that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan calls "a once-in-a-century catastrophe" has him dreaming of discredited Wall Street bankers building golf courses atop their Park Avenue penthouses to make ends meet. "Tom Thumbs make good economic sense," says golf-course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr, chairman of Robert Trent Jones II LLC in Palo Alto, California. "My father built them in the 1930s. They were a mixture of pride and embarrassment, but it was a way to make money during a difficult time for golf." Agencies (China Daily 10/07/2008 page16) |
