In Saturday’s Evening News, the subject of declining golf club members was opened up to questions. One reader wrote the following; “Why pay £580 to play golf in the wind and rain,” he queried, “when the Playstation and the Wii get the job done in the comfort of your own home?"
My response to this question might be obvious, but captain of Lothianburn golf club in Edinburgh, David McBain, put it well himself; "The comment indicates perfectly the national trend towards obesity and early ill-health through lack of exercise” he claimed, following up by pointing out “You can't get...the wonderful wellbeing it brings, on a computer”.
He is, of course, perfectly correct. It is a total mistake to even associate sitting in front of the TV twitching a game controller to the sport of golf. Sure, the video game may have the word ‘golf’ in the title and the little figure on the screen may be making golf-movements, but this is not what golf is. Golf is, essentially, the sport of accurately hitting a ball around a course – there is nothing even vaguely similar involved when playing golf games on a computer. You may as well compare cooking a meal to flicking through the cookery channels on Sky!
I find it interesting how, in the world of sport – where players’ skills are tested to the limit to judge who is the best – the most famous players are rarely those who are genuinely the best at what they do. In football, David Beckham is a worldwide megastar not necessarily for his free-kicks of latter years, but for his “good looks” and marriage to a Spice Girl (from another industry where talent and fame rarely go hand in hand). In short, it is not necessarily the best players who are the most popular – but the most interesting players.
When it comes to golf, you don’t get much more interesting than Ian Poulter. Admittedly his golfing style lacks the flair of Camilo Villegas, but his golf clothes are second to none when it comes to eye-catching. So popular is the golfer that, despite the awful £190,000 splash-down at Cog Hill on Sunday, Ian Poulter’s twitter following has reached 601,064! Considering it was “nearly 600,000” about 7 hours ago, that’s quite the boom in popularity!
The reason I am telling you all of this is because Poulter has declared that when he hits a million followers, he will “do a massive give away. irons, woods, putters, gloves, balls, glasses, hats, ea games, and much more.” He may have a fairly long way to go yet, but with an approximate rise of 1,000 fans every 6 hours (or 4,000 fans per day), that’s only around 100 days until he reaches his target. For those of you whose internal calendar is not as finely tuned as mine – in 100 days time...it will be Christmas Eve!
So, if we all pull together and follow ianjamespoulter on twitter for a few months, we may raise his following just enough he’ll have to head up the driving range in a brand new garish outfit – a bright red one, with black boots and a hat with a white bobble on the end! “Walking in a Poulter wonderland...” (the worst sport chant ever).
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