Randon Thoughts About Some Golf Stats

According to the website golfplayed dot com, there are 38,864 golf courses in the world, and of those, 16,752 are located in the US. Japan is in 2nd place with 3,169 courses. Scotland, widely agreed to be the birthplace of golf, is in 10th place with 614 courses. That's about 1 golf courses for every 200 square miles in the US, every 500 square miles in Scotland, and every 35 square miles in Japan.

An estimated 1 to 2 billion golf balls are made annually. That's roughly 25,000 to 50,000 balls per course, per year. Where do they all go? The folks in the golf subreddit, the best experts I know, say: driving ranges, water hazards, golf bags, garages, Bigfoot. Perhaps the #1 answer is; Yeah, I don't know either, that's a whole bunch of golf balls.

How many golf carts are there in the world? Or perhaps I should ask, after searching and searching for even one estimate: why is no one willing to answer this question?  But I see that the golf cart industry is about $2.5 billion a year and growing. At $5,000 to $15,000 a cart, that's hundreds of thousands of new carts a year. 

Hundreds of thousands a year. That's a lot.

Golf carts have been selling well since the 1950's. I'd say there have to be millions of golf carts out there. Not necessarily mostly on golf courses full-time either, because is there room for all of them on golf courses? Not all at once. I've seen a lot of golf carts on movie lots, in movies about movies.

And here's where I start to get paranoid: I've been paying rather close attention to electric vehicles for about a decade now. I had never been one of those Who-holds-back-the-electric-car guys until now, when I think about all those big shots playing golf, the guys who call the shots, riding around in millions of electric golf carts for the past half century or so. Electric, because almost all golf carts are electric, because golfers, just like the rest of, would rather not be bothered by the noise and stink of internal combustion.

All those big shots playing all that golf, riding around in those constant reminders that electricity provides perfectly good, reliable transportation, all the way back to the Eisenhower administration...

 

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Bruce Hornsby and... ?

I don't know whether Bruce Hornsby is really into golf. Huey Lewis is really into golf. And Lewis and Hornsby have worked together. As musicians, I mean. And Hornsby's first big hugely successful group was Bruce Hornsby and the Range, who broke a hole in the sky in 1986 with their debut album The Way It Is and its inspiring title track.

Now, I cannot stress strongly enough that I do not know any of the persons, places, businesses or events in what follows. I am just a big silly goof who calls himself a monkey. For a living. The following is a work of the imagination.

I'm imagining Bruce Hornsby at a driving range in 1984. Big tall guy, Bruce is, minding his own business and hitting some golf balls, when a guy about a foot shorter with a receding hairline comes over, kicks over Bruce's bucket of balls and starts poking him in the chest with a forefinger and yelling at him:

"Yeah, so you think you're a hot-shot piano player, right? You think you're the best piano player around? Huh?" Poke! "Huh?!"

"Um... Hello?" Bruce says. 

But the little bald guy -- relatively little. But so are most guys. Bruce is a huge freak -- is undeterred, he keeps right on poking and yelling: "You think you're hot shit, huh? College Boy?'

"'College Boy'?!"

"You really think you're hot shit, huh? You know where Suzy's is? On route 9?"

I myself do not know of any establishment, past or present, called Suzy's, nor do I know the route of any road called Route 9. I'm just sitting here imagining this. That's all.

"Yeah," Bruce says, "I know where Suzy's is."

 "You sure? I could draw you a map."

"I've been there several times." 

"Well, if you can manage to be there Friday night, around 9 o'clock, then maybe we can see what kind of hot-shot you are. I'll be there, I'm the drummer and lead singer. Suzy's has a piano. I hear there even have it tuned now and then. ...unless you're gonna be too busy."

Bruce looks down and mumbles the admission: "No, I'm not going to be too busy."

And in fact -- that is to say: purely in my imagination -- Bruce is not too busy that Friday evening, and pretty soon he's the group's main lead singer, and two years later they're on MTV playing "The Way It Is" and making a lot of money -- or, at least, Bruce is making a lot of money -- unless they've got a manager who s terrible at his job, or ripping them of, or both. But at the very least, they let the drummer wear a fairly fancy-looking hat and suspenders during the filming of the video.

And for a variety of reasons which I'm too tired to go into here and now, I suspect that Burce was makin' some bank, and that he was paying the band okay too.  But I don't actually KNOW anything about it.

And maybe they were called Bruce Hornsby and the Range because they met at a driving range. Although there's no reason to believe that any of this is true or even coincidentally remotely close to what happened.

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"It's Golf O'Clock Somewhere!"

I have the impression that it's rare for golf players who are not pros to walk the course and carry their clubs the whole 3, 4 miles, instead of riding carts. I hope I'm wrong about that.

I heard a story about the Dallas Cowboys' management buying every player on the roster an electric golf cart. I was surprised: I knew some pro athletes were into golf, but I'd had no idea that many of them were into it that much. 

Than I wondered whether the real story here might be about the Cowboys' management being far out of touch with the daily lives of their players. I pictured some rookies who earn the NFL minimum, saying, "Thanks, Boss, I appreciate the gesture, I really do, but I still live in an apartment. How about paying me enough that I can buy a house so I'll have some place to park this cool new golf cart off the street?"

Then I wondered whether many individual golfers actually own their own carts, or if they just rent them at the course? I googled golf cart rental, and the rates are so high that it seems to me that the best thing might be to buy your own cart, and then buy a van to drive it back and forth from the course. Or just buy a 2010 Leaf and drive it to and from the course and use it as a cart, because that would be a lot cheaper. 

I wondered whether there are still many non-electric golf carts in use.

Then I researched the story and found that it was the Cowboys QB who had gotten a gift for all the players, not the management. And that he had bought each one an electric moped, not a golf cart. 

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Colorful Little Icons on Golf Balls

I've been in 46 of these 50 United States -- all but Hawaii, Washington, Idaho and Maine. And so I've seen a lot of messed-up stuff. 

But I honestly do not know whether I've seen a city with more mobile homes per capita than Anchorage, Alaska. Lots and lots of huge, luxurious houses, and lots and lots of huge trailer parks. I haven't seen Anchorage in 16 years, so it might look completely different now, who knows. Not me, is who. 

Anyway. In the middle of the night about 20 years ago, I was walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage. Why was I walking through a large empty lot in Anchorage in the middle of  the night? Well, to tell you the truth, i was doing my job. It was a messed-up job. I don't want to talk about that job right now. Maybe after the election. Please vote the straight Democratic ticket. Thank you.

So, I was waking through this big empty lot in the middle of the night, but not in the dark, because it was around the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and in that time of the year in Anchorage the sun does set, but it doesn't stay down for very long and the sky doesn't get completely dark. And I was thinking to myself, Well, I wonder if this is where they're going to put the next big trailer park. And that was when I found a golf ball. 

It's a Wilson TC2 Tour golf ball -- I still have it, I'm looking at it right now -- standard white golf ball, except that on one -- what do you call a corner of a sphere? -- except that in the middle of one ordinarily empty white space, it has a colorful little icon bearing the name of a local golf course, on a little outdoors-y picture suggestive of golf. 

What was it doing there? Well, just now, 20 years later, it has occurred to me that they could have been planning to put up a golf course there, and not a trailer park. According to Google, an 18-hole golf course typically covers 120-200 acres, and can be as small as 30 acres if all of the holes are par 3. That lot was at least 30 acres. Trust me. I grew up in rural northern Indiana, in relatively flat land sectioned into 1-mile, 640-acre squares. I'm autistic. I can calculate acreage.

So for 20 years I've been picturing various ways the golf ball could have gotten there. Maybe there was a golf course just over a stand of trees next to the lot, and maybe somebody hit a bad slice. Or maybe someone got mad and deliberately hit a ball out of the course. Google says that the all-time longest drive is over 550 yards and that lots of players can hit a ball over 300 yards. Making it actually rather easily explainable how golf balls can get all sorts of places. I have no idea where that empty lot was. For all I know it could have been right next to a golf course.

Or maybe, I've been thinking to myself over the decades, some big shot was flying over Anchorage in a helicopter, and tried to hit a mobile home resident with a thrown ball. Or maybe he just accidentally dropped a ball out of the helicopter.

But maybe, I'm thinking to myself now, it got there because they were about to put a golf course there.  

Years later, I had moved to a Midwestern city, and I found a golf ball on or near the sidewalk within a few blocks of my home. It's a Nike Mojo 4 Star. And it too has a colorful little icon in a place the manufacturer had left blank, in this case the icon of a local of a utility workers' union. 

And in this case the nearest golf course is more than a mile away, so this little ball has more splainin to do than the first one.

But wait -- let me search for driving ranges on Google Maps... Aha! More easily splainable now! But wait some more... Seems most or all of these driving ranges are indoor. I don't know anything about golf, almost.

These 2 balls, until several days ago, had been about the extent of my 21st-century experience of golf. Are Wilson TC2's and Nike Mojo 4-Star's good golf balls? I don't even know enough about golf for the Google results about these golf balls to tell me whether they're good or bad or expensive or cheap. I have no frame of reference. I have learned, just now, that Nike stopped making golf balls years ago.

Since these were the only 2 golf balls I had seen up close in the 21st century, I assumed that this meant that these days, golf balls all have fascinating colorful little icons put onto them by someone other than the manufacturer. Also, I had done searches for used golf balls on Amazon and seen still more fascinating colorful little icons. 

And so -- the other day I went into the local used -sporting-goods store and bought a plastic box of a dozen used golf balls. 

Why? you ask. Do you always know know why you do everything you do? If so, you and I are very, very different. But yeah, it was partly because I was looking forward to a fascinating little rainbow of those colorful icons. 

I shoulda dug through the bin of individual balls next to the packaged ones. On most of the 12 balls I got, 11 Titleist Pro V1 and Titleist V1X, the big empty white space is left empty. A couple of them have what looks like magic marker stripes in one quadrant -- maybe because "Oh look we both brought Titlesists marked 4" ? -- and 2 of them have decidedly drab, uncolorful little corporate logos, so drab and uncolorful that  you could miss them on your first look. No way you could miss the logo for the golf course or the one for the utilities workers' union on the golf balls I've had for years.

So which is the rule, and which is the aberration -- the 2 golf balls I've had for years, each with a colorful logo, or the 12 I just bought, very much less colorful?

How many times must I tell you that  I DON' KNOW NUTHIN BOUT NO GOLF?! You tell me which is the aberration.

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Amateur and Professional Sports

Chess has existed for well over 1000 years. Tennis has been around for at least 600 years, golf for at least 500. In western Europe, all three of these sports were originally exclusive pastimes of the aristocracy. Playing golf has continued to be primarily the preserve of what Veblen called the leisure class, a status symbol affordable only by a small portion of the population. Tennis, by comparison, has become somewhat less exclusive, and chess is now a mass phenomenon.

 

All three of these sports, as well as other Medieval aristocratic pastimes such as tournaments (jousting) and horse racing, are individual sports. The most popular team sports of the present day did not become popular until the 19th century: baseball, rugby, what Americans call football, what the rest of the world calls football and Americans call soccer, basketball, handball and so forth.

These team sports grew simultaneously in two categories: amateur sports for the upper class, as sports had been, and, something new, professional sports which were much more open to the entire society, and which, indeed, were often looked down upon by the aristocrats and the rich middle class wishing to join the upper classes. And large-scale amateur sports persist to this day in the US in the form of school sports, including college sports.

And perhaps it is better to call them "amateur" sports, in quotation marks, because, right from the start, university football and baseball and basketball teams cheated, and included players who were not really university students. 

Back in the mid-19th century in the US, attendance at universities was still mostly confined to relatively wealthy white men. It was a status symbol of the upper classes, as sports traditionally had been. However, as team sports grew explosively in popularity, and they began to generate huge amounts of revenue from ticket sales, and as college sports began to gain fans who had never been to college, the code of exclusivity was regularly broken, and the pool of players expanded far beyond the upper classes, in order to find the very best players. 

And from the mid-19th century until today, most people have known that the claim that most of a college's athletes are actually students, is untrue. 

In the rest of the world, many sports -- above all soccer, by far the most popular sport in the world -- developed in an entirely different way, with none of this pretense of amateurism. The revenues are openly shared with the athletes, not just in the "major leagues" as is the case in the US, but in all leagues. 

Baseball still has its minor leagues, although these have been mostly replaced by college baseball. Each major league team owns or is closely and exclusively associated with teams in several minor leagues, which form a pool of young talent for the major leagues to pick from. 

Most of the soccer teams outside of the US are independent entities. Typically, a country will have many soccer leagues, and a team can move up to a higher, more prosperous league by leading the league below it, while the team which did worst in the higher league moves to the lower league.

It's a much more sensible way of doing things. The American system is much more like a battle royal, with millions of children competing for a few thousand positions in which their financial compensation may begin to reflect the revenue they generate for others. There are only a very few, very impoverished and unsuccessful independent minor leagues in American football and basketball. Quite a few American athletes have figured out that they will be better treated in other countries, where basketball and baseball leagues and leagues in still other sports are modeled upon the soccer model.

And so, ironically, in the US, which supposedly was founded upon a rejection of things like aristocracy -- although that's a pretense about as transparent as that in which college athletes are supposed to be students -- amateur sports has become a very cruel exploitation of young poor people. 

Perhaps even more ironically, one of the few other parts of the world who indulged in a lie about amateur sports was -- the former Soviet bloc. Were they doing this in order to compete with their great rival and enemy, the US? I don't know.