Golf drivers can be bought, and you can even buy the best golf drivers online. You don’t have to be a golfer to buy golf drivers.
The reason people who don’t play golf can still own and operate a golf driving range is that golfers are not the only people who buy golf drivers. Visitors to a driving range can buy a pair of golf drivers. And if there are enough of them, and they are sufficiently wealthy, they might be able to make enough money to open their own driving range.
If you don’t play golf, but you know someone who does, you should consider buying him or her a pair of new golf drivers. I would suggest something with high loft.
Golfers aren’t like baseball players. Baseball players can be built pretty much any way you want, and they can be made to do almost anything you want. But golfers are more like the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had so many gods to worship that the standard was to make them beautiful.
Golfers are not the sort of thing that can be mass-produced. There is no tangible good in a golf driver. If you’re going to buy one, you’re probably doing it because it’s something pretty, but there’s no reason not to just wait for something prettier. So golf clubs have to be built on a custom basis, using wood that grows only in one place or on trees that only bloom during the time of year when it would be nice to have a club. And once you find out how those things are done, there’s no point in making more golf drivers exactly like the ones already on the market; you already know what makes them special.
Golf is a game with a long history. So far as we can tell, no golfer has ever hit a golf ball for money. But there have been many attempts to make it into a business.
Golf is an ideal industry for turning into money: it has an obsessive fan base, and there is almost nothing else that you could do with a golf ball other than sell it to them.
It turns out that golfers are very choosy about their golf balls. They will buy only ones that they think they can hit straighter than the average golfer. Having bought one, they feel no particular urge to buy another.*
Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to announce the launch of the new Wilson Golf Driver. It is the best-selling golf driver in history. One out of every four drivers sold in America is a Wilson. It is made in our great American factory in Los Angeles. It is available in four models. The X1 1,000 is the top model and comes with an adjustable stock head, one of the most popular stocks in golf today. Our regular stock head has also been improved. It has a better feel and looks more like an iron than ever before.
The X2 500 driver has a very close fit and you will be amazed at how easy it is to hit the ball straight from any position on the fairway or rough. The next model down, the X3 300, has a nice low CG that gives you about 15 yards more distance than our other models but without sacrificing control.
We have also created a new model for ladies called the J7 100 driver. The J7 disk technology makes it easier to hit the ball so you can use it for all distances from your tee box to your third shot on the green
The Tour is a sport for people who can’t play. It’s an odd sport, because it’s a game of skill at a game of chance: you can win by assembling the best possible set of shots from an unplayable set, but that’s almost impossible to do.
But if you can’t play the Tour, there are other alternatives. You can buy the next golfer to come along and pretend to be him. You can buy his swing, his putting stroke, his long game, his short game. You play against yourself; the Tour doesn’t really matter.
That makes golf one of the very few sports where you don’t need to know anything about it to make money. You don’t even need to know anything about golf, or how it is played: all you need is patience and luck.
And there are lots of ways to get lucky.
Golfers, like all people, want to feel successful. The problem is that golf is hard to do right. The sport has a history of cheating, and the swings are so complicated that any mistakes are really hard to see.
If you stop doing this business seriously enough to devote yourself to it as a hobby, it’s not the best way to feel successful. But if you don’t stop doing it seriously enough to devote yourself to it as a hobby, how can you feel successful? So nobody really feels very successful in golf – except the sponsors, who get their name on every ball that’s hit.
It’s a strange business model. Golfers take one for the team – that is, for the game – but they can’t be sure it will work out in the end. And there is no guarantee that any given golfer will be able to make money from his golf skills – or even from his celebrity status as a golfer.
When I try to explain golf to a non-golfer, I tend to use the analogy of throwing a baseball. I compare golfers to baseball pitchers, while the golf ball is like a cricket pitched at 90 mph. The fact that I have to make this analogy tells you how hard it is to communicate what golf is really about.
The good news is that it’s really easy to understand something if you know what it isn’t. Golf is not pitching a ball with a stick. If you want to understand the game, you don’t have to try to imagine it in your head; you just have to let go of all those preconceptions and look at it for what it is: a game about hitting small balls that move fast and go round in circles in an environment where the only real goal is not losing.
That’s why Bill Murray’s character in “Caddyshack” says “Golf! It’s not a sport! It’s a way of life!”