Monday, July 02, 2001
Golf is a bargain
It's a great time to be a hacker. Life has never been better for the 17-handicapper and his set of used Tommy Armours. Have you seen the ads lately?
Very respectable public courses are giving away golf. Twenty-five dollars to play as much as you want after 2 o'clock! It's not dark until 9! If you play fast and don't get stuck behind four morons lining up tap-ins and looking for power-hooked tee shots like they're hunting snipe, you can play 36 holes for 25 bucks!
Think of $50 suits at Brooks Brothers. Think of riding The Beast all day for a buck and a half. Think of an excuse to escape that 2 p.m. meeting.
What if Graeter's started selling chocolate chip for 25 cents a pint?
It's like that.
You pay less to play Pebble Creek now than you did eight years ago. Nothing costs less now than it did eight years ago. Especially not golf, the supposed sport of the upper crust.
Only now, it does.
“We've reached the point of saturation,” said Mike Macke, who co-owns Pebble Creek, Sugar Ridge and a few others.
Supply vs. demand
It's a simple case of supply and demand. Right now, demand is kicking supply all over the yard. The developers built too many golf courses, for too few golfers. The competition is eating them alive.
A recent survey by the National Golf Foundation showed on any given Sunday at least three times as many people are watching golf on TV as are playing golf. “No one knows why,” says Brett Slater, the pro at Hickory Woods in Loveland.
From this end, no one cares. Hon, you seen my Footjoys?
Remember when gassing up at Sinclair got you a free stuffed dinosaur? At Sugar Ridge, if your foursome plays 18 with a cart at regular rates, they give you a dozen balls.
I'm waiting for the good people at Pebble Creek to pick me up in a limo, clean my clubs on the way and have an air-conditioned cart charged up and humming at the 1st tee. Would you like a cold beverage, Mr. Daugherty?
Cost around $30
For $30, you can play 18 holes almost anywhere around here, and you don't even have to walk. Even Shaker Run, the king of public tracks, only wants $49.
These aren't hay fields. Sugar Ridge is gorgeous and well-maintained. Pebble Creek requires every club in the bag. Shaker you know about.
It takes a lot of rounds a year to keep a golf course solvent. To hear local club pros tell it, almost no course is getting them. Private clubs no longer have waiting lists, unless you're waiting to get out of your membership agreement. Initiation fees are dropping like Tiger Woods' birdie putts.
Macke, who has built several area courses, says a fair price in the Cincinnati area for a weekend round with a cart is about $40. You could play 90 percent of the public courses here for less than that.
It's just a fine excuse to blow off yardwork.
Macke just came back from Michigan, where he paid $85 to play a public course he said was no better than the courses we're paying $30 to play here.
As with most things around here, we don't know how good we've got it.
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
Check out our Tristate golf guide for a directory and features on local courses, coverage of the Men's and Women's Met, and other news.
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DAUGHERTY: Golf is a bargain