Gone With the Geeks

An old figure has wandered off the course, through the rough and into the trees, out of the duchy of golf. He wears oversized plaid pants, scuffed white shoes, a shirt with loud, wide stripes and, over his heavily jowled face, a battered, brimmed hat. The wood of his driver is nicked, and he wheezes from walking the front nine.

In his stead, leaning on his/her sleek titanium driver is a well-tanned, semi-buffed figure. Wrapped trimly in designer clothes, maybe by Armani or Boss, he/she shows solid form, even while contemplating their inner golfer. The tunes in the headphones are by fellow golfaholics, Hootie and the Blowfish or perhaps Van Halen.

Yes, golf, that pastime of ill-dressed fogies and Pecksniffian elitists, is turning a hip and trendy corner as the millennium approaches. Where once it was merely the province of country-clubbers and the odd public-course hacker, the sport seems to be entering a new era of considerable cachet.

Popular movies are being made about it. Celebrities of all stripes beg to be seen at the tee. Younger folks are taking up the game. And marketers, who adore those younger consumers, are coming straight at them.

“Ten years ago, if you were on the high school golf team, you were a dork. Today, you’re hip,” said Brent Diamond, publisher of Inside Golf magazine, which comes from the niche sports group, Surfer Publications Inc., in San Juan Capistrano. Inside Golf, targeted to a new generation of golfers, premieres Sept. 3. “We just believe there are a lot more people interested in what you might call the total golf experience. There are many facets to that: equipment, new instruction techniques, a new sense of humor and a sort of bringing in of the youth culture.”

Diamond and other upscale marketers see golfers of the ‘90s as thirty- or fortysomethings hoping to stay youthful, unlike their parents, who tended to settle into their middle years with a plop. At the same time, the ancient Scots game may be giving these still fast-tracking folks an interlude of something slower, calmer and reflective in their lives.

Golf is also going through something of a literary renaissance as well. “Golf Dreams,” John Updike’s golf stories from the New Yorker and elsewhere is being published by Knopf in September. John Feinstein’s book on the Professional Golf Assn. tour, “A Good Walk Spoiled,” (Little, Brown, 1995) was a recent bestseller.

In actuality, the number of Americans playing golf has remained steady at 25 million after a 50% run-up in the late 1980s.

But what happened in the ‘90s was that golfers became younger. The group between 12 and 17 years old playing golf increased from 1.7 million only two years ago to 2 million. Various golf organizations started to recruit youngsters with programs like Hook a Kid on Golf, which teaches inner-city kids the game, and cheaper fees for teenagers during off hours.

And then the most popular athlete in the world admitted a serious case of golf fever. “Michael Jordan dragged golf out of the gutter of geekdom,” said Gary McCord, a CBS-TV golf announcer whose smart-alecky commentary is worlds away from the traditional hushed reverence. “A minority kid, or just any old kid, looks at Jordan or Charles Barkley playing golf and says, ‘Wait a minute!’ These are world-class athletes and they’re talking about how much trouble they’re having on the course. All of a sudden, maybe those old fat guys had something.”

Not only is Jordan spending his daylight hours figuring out how to slam-dunk his bad lie with a seven iron, so are a lot of entertainment types. Kevin Costner, who will star in the film “Tin Cup,” a golf fantasy, can’t stay away from the game. “Melrose Place” hunk Jack Wagner, perhaps the best golfer in Hollywood, has gotten his handicap down to zero. (That means he’s a super player.)

Teri Hatcher, TV’s Lois Lane, whose image is the most downloaded on the Internet, could be Hollywood’s next golf Superwoman. Clint Eastwood (16 handicap) wants to make a film out of the cult golf book “Golf in the Kingdom,” and is said to want to have Sean Connery (eight handicap) star in it.

Oddly, the sport’s growing appeal comes despite the rich professional golf tour, which is loaded with colorless players, the dorks of yore. The personalities with flair tend to be those on the astonishingly popular senior circuit: Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

Then there is that sweet swinger in the White House. The biggest problem President Clinton may have with the fall campaign is finding time to play his favorite game. Showing historical bipartisanship, Clinton asked famed golf course architect Robert Trent Jones to re-create the putting green that Republican First Duffer Dwight Eisenhower had built 50 paces outside the Oval Office. (A joke around the White House is that Clinton believes that Richard Nixon’s greatest presidential sin was not Watergate, but removing Eisenhower’s putting green.)

Last month Clinton reached his greatest personal goal. No, it wasn’t the passage of universal health care, but breaking 80. The president shot a 79 on the par-72 Coronado Island municipal course outside San Diego on June 10. “I was hot. I was smoking ‘em. I was having a good time. Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes,” he told reporters.

The next big splash for golf should be the opening of “Tin Cup” on Aug. 8. It is directed by Ron Shelton, the former minor-league baseball player whose earlier films include “Bull Durham,” an ode to the pure pleasures of baseball. Costner stars as “Tin Cup” McAvoy, a Texas driving range owner who uses lessons from a female psychologist (Rene Russo) to help him qualify for the U.S. Open.

“It’s about a self-destructive guy trying to get his life together,” said Shelton, himself an eight-handicap player. “Golf is a great theatrical ritual for trying to gain control. Why is it so hard to hit that ball to the right place? . . . No one is responsible for your score except you. You can’t blame a pitcher for throwing at your head. There is no Bubba Smith trying to crush you. You can’t blame bad reviews or marketing. I love the eternal, blind, stupid hopefulness that surrounds the game.”

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Steve Cohen has made a whole study out of that eternal, blind, stupid hopefulness. Cohen, a therapist by training, calls himself the founder, president, chief cook and bottle washer of the Shivas Irons Society. He, along with golf pro Fred Shoemaker, started a course in 1988 at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute based on the ethereal golf theories of Shivas Irons, the fictional hero of the novel “Golf in the Kingdom,” (Viking, 1972) written by Esalen Institute guru Michael Murphy.

“Essentially it is about golf as a mirror to your inner world,” said Cohen. “How you are on the golf course reflects how you are in the world. You can learn a lot more about yourself playing golf than whether you can putt.”

Cohen likes the idea of people thinking about why they do what they do, which is what Shivas Irons does in “Golf in the Kingdom.”

“It is true that any human endeavor has metaphorical qualities, but golf takes place in an environment that makes it happen more easily,” said Cohen. “It is slow. You do it by yourself. Ninety-nine percent of the time is between shots. There is a set of rules, but it is mostly centered around a code of behavior or a value system. It is a lifelong activity and it has a handicap system that truly allows people of different levels to play together. . . . The average Joe could hardly play one-on-one basketball with Michael Jordan.”

While Cohen and his Shivas Irons friends may emphasize the inner duffer, golf marketers are looking more at the outer self these days, and they see this outer self becoming, if not always younger, at least trendier. This year, for instance, Giorgio Armani has come out with his first golf clothing line, for men and women.

“These are not laughable clothes. They are very wearable for the sophisticated golfer,” said Edmund Paszylk, Armani’s Chicago-based manager/buyer, who said the line has mostly muted colors like khaki, as opposed to the cliched oddball plaids and prints. “This is what you will see Kevin Costner wear in ‘Tin Cup.’ Armani just found a popularity of golf among our customers becoming more widespread. Our customers want things that are not too outlandish, sophisticated, comfortable and very wearable.”

Similarly, golf equipment companies have upped their spending on research, development and design to attract the new hip golfer.

“It used to be that the ball was white, clubs were gray and everyone had a silver shaft,” said Mike Kelly, marketing manager for Taylor Made Golf Co. in Carlsbad. “Now we hire designers and add flair and spice to every product. The colors flow. Our clubs are copper-colored. . . . We all have fashion people to design head covers, which would have been unheard of only two years ago. This is a ‘lifestyle’ sport now, and products are more like athletic shoes or computers.” (And in some cases, almost as ridiculously priced.)

Taylor Made is a leader in the use of titanium. Titanium is lighter and more malleable than wood or other metals traditionally used to make clubs. Thus club heads can now be made larger--much like what happened with tennis racquets a generation back--so that “sweet spot” is larger as well. Last year, Taylor Made came out with what it calls a “Bubble Shaft,” in which a bulge below the grip apparently helps make a swing about 10% faster.

The top golf equipment companies, most centered around Carlsbad in a sort of Titanium Valley, are hard in competition to find the next innovation that will allow you to hit the ball farther and straighter. This doesn’t sit well with some traditionalists.

“There is no question the game is being made easier to play for the average person, and that is good,” said Jerry Green, an economics professor at Harvard and trainer for rules officials for the U.S. Golf Assn. “If the speed of play could be increased, that would be good for the game.

“But if golfers are able to start hitting the ball more than 300 yards and they find a way to make a ball not hook or slice, then you will have to make new longer and narrower golf courses, and there is not enough real estate around for that,” said Green. “This is a game filled with history and tradition. There are only about 13,000 courses around the country. That is our capital stock, and if you had to throw out half of them because of some strange club innovation, that would be a great loss.”

None of this worries McCord, a former second-line touring pro who has tutored such cool new duffers as Costner and members of Hootie and the Blowfish, who wrote the introduction to McCord’s primer, “Golf for Dummies” (IDG Books, 1996).

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know that golf will ever change that much. We have always been on the cutting edge of geek,” said McCord. “When I was in high school, the golf team was the guys who couldn’t get on the chess team and were too tall for library aide. We have planted all the mores and values of geekdom, with the plaid pants and white belts and colors that match radiantly on our souls. Golfers have always been the guys who get out of the car to change a flat and get a truck driver throwing his Big Mac on them.

“Maybe Costner and Jordan and all of them,” he said, “are just heavily disguised geeks.”