Its members infamously took 260 years to welcome women, but the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews is rapidly catching up with modern life this week.
Old Course traditionalists found themselves surrounded by screaming teenagers as word got out on Thursday that pop singer Harry Styles had shown up and teed off.
Now R&A executives are looking to break even further from the club’s intransigent past by launching a diversity-focused drive to get millions more playing modern forms of the sport.
“Golf is open to all,” says Phil Anderton, the R&A’s chief development officer, of his coordinated plan to build on the boom in grass-roots involvement since Covid. Projects include an online pilot, the Golf.Golf platform, which includes searchable lists of driving ranges, simulators and municipal courses. There will also be videos fronted by famous faces including Gareth Bale and Mo Farah. Styles is not involved but his former One Direction bandmate Niall Horan fronts a TV program in which he invites his celebrity friends to join him for a round. Over the coming weeks, expect them all to start waxing lyrical about the virtues of the sport to their tens of millions of social media followers.
In explaining why the project has been launched, Anderton expressed concern at research suggesting 92 per cent of the public do not see golf as a modern game. “The challenge is to attract and keep that older audience while simultaneously being attractive to the younger audience,” he said.
Programs will be rolled out to the 200 national federations which, until now, have been receiving checks but little help with practically growing the sport.
Anderton, a former CEO at Scottish Rugby, Hearts FC and chairman of the ATP Tour World Finals, unashamedly talks of taking inspiration from Coca-Cola, another former employer, for having a clear global message.
“You’ve got to be business-led if you wish to continue to maintain your position,” he said after inviting Telegraph Sport to his St Andrews office. “Historically at the R&A, we would take the money that we get from the Open and give grants to our affiliates around the world. ‘There’s a check for £50,000 pounds’.
“But it’s inefficient to have 200 countries go and create their own activation programs. So what Coke does and a lot of big global companies do is create global assets that can then be taken by the individual countries and can be tailored to their local market. A good example of that would be Coca Cola and Christmas. That’s run everywhere around the world when they celebrate Christmas. So we thought, ‘well, why don’t we do the same thing?'”
Effectively, Anderton’s rebranding of the sport will be a pitch to a younger audience that golf boosts health and well-being. If he is successful, it could mark a significant new chapter for the R&A’s guardianship of the game.
The R&A became the sole authority on rules in the UK in the late 1800s and manages the Open Championship, which begins at Royal Liverpool next month.
However, with the members club only accepting female members since 2014, there is an acknowledgment from Anderton that some traditionalists may be skeptical.
“I think there probably is a bit of surprise,” he said. “But if you’re gonna make an omelette, you’ve got to smash a few eggs and I would say that I’ve been really pleasantly surprised at the R&A that the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrew have been very supportive of the moves that we’re taking, because they’re passionate about golf, and they are clever people and they realize that these types of moves will ultimately help us deliver what we want, which is the sport thriving in 50 years time.”
The R&A is thought to be spending somewhere in the region of £400,000 on projects so far, with the celebrities involved providing their services for free. Anderton cites research suggesting some novices are put off by the prospect of spending five hours playing 18 holes. Others are put off by the perception they will have to pay for £60-an-hour tuition, he added. As a result, his program will focus on the availability of nine-hole formats, driving ranges and also six-hole programs for children.
However, he adds: “Don’t leave with the impression that what we’re trying to do is to tell every golf club around the world that ‘you must move to this type of model’. I’m not trying to do that at all. Golf comes in many flavors and there will be golf clubs and golfers around the world who love nothing better than being part of a traditional golf club, dressing suit jacket and tie with the rules. Good luck to them.”
While traditions are maintained in picturesque St Andrews, where the club was first formed in 1754 by 22 “noblemen and gentlemen”, the R&A is innovating at another site it owns, the “Golf It” concept due to open in Glasgow. The vast indoor and outdoor attraction includes pitch and putt, adventure golf and a double decker floodlit driving range.Anderton said the key demographic identified as a target participants were younger adults who currently play other sports.
But he added: “I don’t think that having an older audience on its own is a significant problem. I think it’s a fantastic thing. Now, if you relied solely on an older market and didn’t replenish that by bringing in younger audiences, guess what will happen? Those people ultimately move on.”
Critics may cry that the sport does not currently require such innovation. Research will be published by the R&A in the next fortnight showing that the sport has maintained growth despite warnings that it would dip again. But Anderton says the sport is best placed to build from a position of strength, and he denied any suggestion that his new program is a response to the Saudi-funded LIV Golf making a garish play to appeal to a younger fanbase.
“We’re not competing against all these bodies that are out there,” he said. “This is just us, as guardians of the game, doing what we can do beyond the very important traditional roles of governance and referees and technology. What can we do to help support the activities of all the federations and affiliates around the world? That’s what’s driving it. Simple as that.”
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