By Alan Watson, President, GOLF+ Dothan and PCB
I started playing golf when I was young. Very young. Not Tiger Woods at age 3 on the Mike Douglas Show young but pretty close. My father loved the game so much that he opened his own golf shop in 1988. He has played courses all over the United States and his memory for golf courses and specific holes is uncanny. Meanwhile, I can barely remember what I shot last week or where I played.
Gary Player still plays golf at eighty-eight years old. Jack Nicklaus was still swinging as one of the official starters of the Masters this year. And millions of people still enjoy golf well into their seventies, eighties, and even their nineties.
Golf is a game that you can enjoy (or be frustrated by) from four to forty and from eight to eighty! Golf is maybe the only sport that is enjoyed by such a wide age range of people.
We get our children into it. We encourage young people to take up the game for social reasons or perhaps to try and get a college scholarship. We tell young working men and women to play the game because it’s good for business.
My best golf memories are playing with my son and with my father. Those games were special and even though no one remembers the score, we all remember the time spent together outdoors. Honestly, these aren’t just my best golf memories – they might be my best memories period: walking the course as a youngster with my brother, my mother, and my father at the Dothan Country Club, watching my mother hit yet another shot into the water but smiling and laughing and having fun. Later I came to find out that she really wasn’t that interested in the game, but only played so we could spend time together as a family. I will always cherish that thought and knowledge.
The recent global pandemic brought over two million new people to the game of golf. With more time away from work and less ability to congregate indoors, golf became one of the few things people could safely do and still be social. So golf exploded again like it did when Tiger Woods burst onto the scene and new faces popped up in golf shops and golf courses the world over.
Golf is not always the most affordable sport and, at times and in certain places, it isn’t the most accessible either, however, golf is here to stay and those of us who love the game will keep on trying to put that little white ball in the tiny hole for as long as we can!
