City Golf is the nation’s leader in golf instruction. Our goal is to be the best golf instruction center in the country. We provide high quality service and information to our members and their families. We offer lessons, clinics, private and group instruction, on-course coaching, instructional videos, and pro shop services to compliment our on-course services.
We were created because two friends had a dream. They wanted to give back to the game they love so much that they would devote their lives to it. They wanted to share their passion for golf with others so that all can enjoy and excel at this great game.”
The name City Golf was chosen because of the nature of our business; we are a company that truly loves golf and believes everyone should have access to good instruction, so it makes sense for us to focus on city golfers.
City Golf: New York City’s
Somewhere, around the mid-1980s, a good golf teacher started to think about how to make his job easier. He knew his students were getting better and better from new clubs, balls and bags; he wanted to make sure he stayed on top of things. As a result, he decided to branch out into new areas.
The first was with accessories. The idea was to sell drill presses and a line of putters made by a local machine shop. But the teacher soon realized there are plenty of other tools that help golfers improve their games. He set up a consulting business: “Hang in there – it’ll get easier.”
The second step was to reach beyond the golf world. The teacher realized that today’s young golfers are mostly playing on old courses maintained by public agencies or private clubs that had little idea what they were doing. These courses have less than perfect conditions; they need work. So he set up courses in public parks, and charged nothing for instruction (and got no government funding).
Still, the teacher didn’t want to give up teaching golf because he still considered this his primary interest. He set up two more instructional businesses: city golf and country club golf. In both cases, he taught six hours a day for
As a child, I was always amazed by what seemed to be the perfect way to get people to play golf: hire a professional instructor. When I was young, there were not many of these professionals, and if you were one you could charge a lot of money. So my parents paid for me to have lessons from an instructor named Wally.
Here is what I remember about that experience:
First, after we got onto the putting green, he explained how it worked. He told us that if you put your ball into the hole, you got one point; if it went in past the hole, you got two points; and if it went out of bounds or over the green, you got no points at all. Then he demonstrated how to do this with a small ball. Then he showed us how to do it with a large ball. Then he gave us some balls and told us how long we had to hit them into fairways or greens or holes or out of bounds—and marked down on a piece of paper where we were supposed to put our balls when we made our shots. Then he showed us how to tell whether our shots were good or bad by looking at a piece of paper with little numbers on it—which numbered each hole in the course—
Golf is still a big deal in America and has been for centuries. The US Open golf tournament is the third largest sporting event in the world with more than 300 million viewers, and is broadcast live by ESPN. The first official professional golf tour was created in Scotland in 1864. Here’s a brief history of the game:
1872: Golfers begin playing “putter-ball” (also known as “Putter’s Game”) at Sycamore Hill on Staten Island.
1874: Golfers start playing “round ball” (or “old style golf”) at Philadelphia Cricket Club.
1883: Golfers introduce womens’ tournaments to America.
1895: Golfers introduce the first set of rules for “shank” or slice shots (the one we are all familiar with today).
1912: First women’s professional golf tour begins; it lasts only two years because the best players refuse to play against them.
1916: Lawrence Park Golf Course opens in Chicago, the first municipal golf course to be built in America.
1921: The first two-cushion links is opened in St Andrews, Scotland; there are now 22 links courses across Britain, 15 of them outside London.
Golf courses-–even public ones-–are a tough way to run a business. The only real competition is the weather, which many people regard as basically irrelevant. And the only real customers are other golfers, who have no choice but to buy their own clubs.
The big growth industries in America are not food but golf courses. There are now almost 20 million golfers in America and some 250,000 golf courses-–an increase of almost a third since 2000. But that still leaves a lot of room for growth.
That’s why people like me are starting new golf schools. We aren’t trying to do anything with “golf,” though we can make money on it if we succeed at running the school well enough to attract students and corporate clients. We’re just trying to sell “Golf” as an idea, which we think is worth selling even if you don’t know much about golf yet and even if you don’t care much about it after you’ve been taught how to play it well enough to get paid for it.
The worst golfers always seem to be the ones who think they should be good. So why do they play? Why do people keep playing the game?
I think it is because golf is supposed to give you a sense of accomplishment—you can play it however badly, and still feel like you have done something. Golf also seems like a game you could win, which means that it is a good test of your ability to deal with disappointment.
When you are running through a magazine article on how to get better, you are thinking about how to get on the green; when you are driving through a residential neighborhood, you are thinking about how to get home. When you reach the hole in one, you are thinking about the next shot. For some reason, those things all tend to come out of your mouth at about the same time.
If this is true, then it is an example of what I call “cognitive dissonance reduction.” You don’t want your brain telling you two different things at once; so if you are trying to improve, what is common between being bad and being good? The answer is that being bad isn’t just about learning things for yourself; it is also about learning things that will make other people think more highly of you.