Like tennis, golf has acquired the reputation of being a sport for the rich and the well connected. The ordinary people feel that they are excluded from this sport and that they have no interest in participating in it or supporting it. When they look at the people who watch the sport and who play it, the clarity about the elitism becomes even starker. The efforts to make it more inclusive have ended up being arbitrary or just a plain joke. If you try to persuade some poor boy on the council estate about the need to play golf when they are looking for their next meal, then you are onto a definite loser. The reputation has grown and grown that normal people have no business trying to get involved with golf.
Is this a deserved reputation?
When you are trying to work out the dynamics of any activity whether it is sport or a pastime, the first thing that you consider is the people who are involved. You will be interested to see how they interact with one another and what they bring to the sport. You will also be interested to know if there are some people in there who have similar backgrounds to yours. If so you will also look to see how they are treated because logic tells you that were you to join the group you would be treated in a similar if not identical way. All the people who show an interest in widening the coverage of their sport know this. Even television programmers understand this concept.
Looking at the specific example of the sport of golf, the entrants and participants are just extraordinary. Most of them are at the very least multi millionaires. It is true to say that many of those who joined golf were not as rich as they are now when they first decided to become professional players. However since the impression has already stuck, it is very hard to persuade people about the inclusivity that golf can bring. The golf players themselves are sometimes guilty of not putting enough effort into disseminating their sport more widely than it currently is. Some of them seem to positively revel in the exclusive nature of the sport to the extent that they have been called arrogant and unfriendly.
The work that it takes to build a successful golf player is so enormous and the expenses are so prohibitive that it could literally cripple a normal working family just in one stroke. No parent would lightly take the decision to stunt the development of the rest of the family just because they want to take the chance that one of their own might just become a successful golf player. This is a great barrier to entrance into the sport and has contributed to the reputation for elitism.
