We're the grand old golfers: Clubs welcome older players as membership drops
WITH golf club membership falling many clubs welcome older members. They may not always be the best players but they are very keen and nobody says anything when you completely miss the ball
SEE this shambling tribe limping up the hill and it’s hard not to laugh.Helmets with ear-flaps like Russian generals, padded jackets like Michelin men, trousers that end just before the knee, diamond-patterned jumpers, the odd tantalising glimpse of long-johns and waterproofs that would see you round the Horn in a force 10.
“They look like the Light Brigade,” I heard one man say. “On the way back.” Seniors, they are called in the world of golf or, as the less generous put it, old gits. Old gits we may be but I think our time has come.
Golf is in trouble. Club membership is on the wane. In Scotland between 2004-2013 it fell 14 per cent. In Wales it has steadily declined. It’s worse in England where club membership dropped 20 per cent in the same time.
Yet – and this is the good news – seniors’ golf is on the way up. In England the number of comical old golfers – sorry, seniors – has increased from 237,000 to more than 270,000.
In other words if golf has a future it’s in the slightly shaky hands of the much-mocked old boys. It’s all very well for these strapping young chaps who come along at weekends showing off with their 300-yard drives and 30ft putts.
But during the week when they’re back fi ddling with their expenses and their secretaries it’s the little old gits who keep the fairways busy. It gives the sport a rather special fl avour of... let’s call it maturity.
These days most clubs are so desperate for new members that they have abandoned all that silly social sifting
During the week in the changing room you might hear someone whistling White Cliffs Of Dover.
Our dream date is Mary Berry. Now of course it’s true that there are many seniors who are very fine single-fi gure golfers. Equally there are quite a lot of elderly gentlemen who can’t quite do what they used to, including golf.
And there are others who like me came to this sport approximately half a century too late. We don’t yearn for a place in the Ryder Cup team so much as a seat at the 14th so we can have a nice sit-down. Our motivations are many and strange.
Many are sent by their doctors for health reasons although it has always seemed odd to me that pensioners concerned about their cholesterol and high blood pressure should take up a sport that is fuelled almost entirely by bacon sandwiches.
The first problem for seniors is identifying a suitable club. Time was when to join a golf club they wanted to know about your school, regiment and skills with a knife and fork.
These days most clubs are so desperate for new members that they have abandoned all that silly social sifting. They are so desperate that all you need to get in is to comb your hair and don’t blow your nose on the curtains.
But clubs do vary and what you want is a nicely balanced one, for which you need look no further than the car park. The clue is a democratic balance of Jags and Skodas with one or two white vans in case you need a plumber in a hurry. And possibly one or two hills to test your pacemaker.
That’s how I ended up at Petersfi eld in glorious Hampshire. It’s a wonderful course with helpful pro staff and friendly and entertaining members.
Do an air-shot here – that embarrassing moment when your club misses the ball – and they all start looking at their feet and discussing holiday plans. These are forgiving people. Like most seniors our old boys’ existence is a tribute to medical science.
We have tin knees, plastic hips, lasered eyes and deaf-aided ears, blocked arteries and more by-passes than Milton Keynes. I tell you, look at this lot and it gives you faith in the invincible optimism of the human spirit. Pragmatism, that’s what sport is at this time of life.
Everyone checks to see if the club flag is at half-mast as they come in. “Who is it this time? Charlie?” Then after a moment’s thought: “I wonder what he’s doing with his clubs?”
In our informal Monday morning group we have players who have excelled at all sort of sports and although they will never again send a lightning pass from the base of the scrum or hit a lofted drive over mid-on at least they have golf. It was rather different for me.
Over the years I have failed at everything from table tennis to polo so to see my ball vanish into the long grass of a Hampshire prairie is only what I was expecting. Outsiders see only suntanned heads or wispy white hair and watery eyes. But little old chaps weren’t always little old chaps.
A little while ago they were ambassadors and judges, powerful men of business, teachers, electricians and no doubt the odd bookie. One chap was rumoured to have risked his life in the uniform of the Queen. We thought he was SAS but it turned out he’d been a traffi c warden in Portsmouth.
They may not look it but they have lived and loved, they have circled the globe, been to war, made millions, lost millions, been married, had mistresses and no doubt behaved very badly in their time.
As one said to me, peeling off his waterproof trousers on the sixth as the sun came out: “It’s a long time since I took my trousers off in a fi eld and I’ve rather lost the knack.” These days they’d swap all that youthful excitement for a steady hand on the putter.
Golf clubs, where you don’t get much by way of bad behaviour, rarely make headlines. We leave all that to those over-heated tennis players.
Surprising, perhaps, because golf is of course a mixed sport. There are women golfers. I have seen them.
It’s hard to tell when any sexual distinction is lost beneath all those waterproofs and thermals and if romance did strike, by the time they’d taken that lot off, no one would be able to remember why. But it looks as though our time has come – let’s face it better golfers are going to have to treat us with a bit of respect.
Already there are signs. There is, I am delighted to report, one golf magazine that has a regular column aimed at men like me.
Diary Of A Bus-pass Golfer, it’s called, in Tee Times, a highly successful free monthly with thousands of readers in the southern counties. The editor Peter Watson is unequivocal about it. “Senior golfers are the backbone of most clubs.
Without seniors many clubs just wouldn’t carry on,” he says. Are you listening, all you low handicappers, all you weekend wonder-stars? Next time you’re complaining about how slow we are and about the noise from our creaking knees remember: no seniors, no golf.
As for us we take a more long-term view. As one of my pals said when someone else was recommending bowls as a challenging and enjoyable game: “You do realise that after bowls there is nothing.” Oh dear.
