Seneca Golf Course is a gated community offering you great golf rates and the exclusive opportunity to play 18 at Seneca Golf Course. Seneca is a beautiful course situated on the Niagara River, located in the heart of Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe region with over 30 lakes and thousands of acres of parkland. It would be hard to find a more picturesque setting for golf or relaxation.
Seneca Golf Course was designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. who received many awards for his work on this course including the prestigious PGA Tour Golfer of the Year award in 1988 and 1991.
The sort of people who buy houses in gated communities are not necessarily the kind of people who like golf. They don’t necessarily like the idea of being surrounded by hundreds of other people in a park setting, because they can’t do what they want to do when they want to do it.
They are probably not the sort of people who get their kicks by going to the local country club and paying $20,000 a year for membership, and then shelling out thousands more per round for food and drink.
So if you are one of those kinds of people, why do you buy a house in a gated community? Probably because it has its own golf course.
I played golf at Seneca in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s a members-only club with a “resort” atmosphere. I had a friendly chat with the pro, and she gave me the tour.
At one point she said: “We get a lot of people here who don’t like golf. They think it’s a luxury sport for rich people.” I thought about that for a moment, and realized what she meant: golf is one of those games that can be made to look expensive by using lots of words.
My experience was not typical. (I’m sure it would have been if I’d paid full price.) Seneca is a nice course that’s well worth playing, but not so nice or so worth playing that you have to pay full price for it. And people love to talk about golf being a sport for rich people; maybe they should try playing for free.
The moral of the story is that golf courses are businesses, and golf is an expensive sport. If you don’t like that idea, you might consider a different sport.
Or if you do like the idea, it’s important to realize that not all golf businesses are alike. Some people get upset at the idea of paying for a public amenity, but that’s not a fair criticism of golf courses. Everyone pays for water and electricity; golf courses are just businesses that are better at arguing about their fees than other businesses.
If you live in New York City, golf is a lot like life: if you can afford it, the course is great; if you can’t, the course sucks.
A few years ago we were moving to Albuquerque, a place I had never visited. The real estate agent’s map told me we were five miles from the nearest golf course. “You’re not going to need a club,” he said. But how could he know? I called around and found that most of the courses in town offered discounts to anyone who lived in that part of town. So we moved here and got discounts on our greens fees just from living here.
People in New York think golf is expensive because they can’t play enough of it. People in Albuquerque think golf is expensive because they can play too much of it. But nearly everyone agrees that an affordable round of golf should cost no more than $20 per person for 18 holes–a third as much as what we pay in New York or even on Long Island.
This is an old joke, and it’s a good one. But what makes it funny is that golf courses are supposed to be public places, not private ones. The fact that someone has to pay for them doesn’t make them public; it just means that anyone who wants to can play for free.
The question you have to ask yourself is, why do people pay? That’s the right question. You should always ask why people do things, not just what they do. To go back to our restaurant example, would you pay $200 for a plate of spaghetti? Of course not. Would you pay $200 for a plate of spaghetti made by someone you like? Not necessarily. The trick is to find out what the person or company is trying to do – if the person or company isn’t trying to do anything at all, then you can ignore that they’re doing anything at all.
In golf this seems like an easy question to answer: people pay because golf is fun. But it’s not so easy. If a lot of people were getting laid off from their jobs and having fun playing golf, we’d already know about it. And in fact there are lots of people having fun playing golf who don’t have jobs laid off from them, and there
More than a century ago, golf began as a gentleman’s game. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became a popular sport for everyone. Today golf is not exclusively for men: women play in tournaments and Ivy League schools have women’s golf teams.
To understand what has happened, you need to know something about the history of the game. At least since the 19th century, golf has been a sport designed to be played by gentlemen. Golf clubs were initially private clubs where rich men gathered to talk about politics and finance, gamble and drink and play cards against each other.
As time went on, these clubs folded into hotels and restaurants and shopping centers. But for decades there was still an undercurrent of snobbery that the members believed was reinforced by the fact that, unlike other sports such as baseball or football or basketball, there were no women’s leagues or womens’ tournaments–until recently, when three major US tourneys were co-ed (Chevy Chase; Colonial; and now Liberty National)
Golf as we know it in America today is a product of this history. It is still seen as something rich people do to amuse themselves while they are on vacation. And daily newspapers are filled with stories about how someone who