Is it a good or bad thing to be part of a punchline on Jimmy Kimmel Live? In the case of NGCOA and the golf industry, I’m chalking up the April 10th mention in Kimmel’s late-night monologue as a good thing. He mentions NGCOA’s participation in a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce and Transportation about potential changes to Daylight Saving Time. While we played no part in Kimmel’s mention of NGCOA, even if it was part of a joke, it reveals a decades-long culmination of the golf industry’s work on Capitol Hill in Washington — something every reader of Golf Business should let sink in for a moment. While the mention was happenstance, it reveals something deeper and something good.
Rewind the clock more than fifteen years, and you’ll see that our friends in Washington had no awareness and little respect for the golf “industry.” I put that word in quotes because most folks on Capitol Hill did not see us as an industry; they saw golf as just a game, primarily cloistered behind tall hedges and probably doing bad things to the environment. Four trade associations in golf (NGCOA, PGA of America, GCSAA and CMAA) came together to form We Are Golf to, among other things, change D.C.’s perception of our industry and start working with us for fairness and goodness in public policy and legislation. We Are Golf later became the American Golf Industry Coalition and has broad support in our industry.
One of the most important moves we made at NGCOA in the past ten years was to build a true advocacy shop. NGCOA has tackled questionable and nefarious behavior in the online tee time space, credit card processing fraud, lawsuits that would damage the golf industry (have you read about the recent Cazenovia Golf Club victory?), and a host of other anti-golf or we-obviously-don’t-understand-golf policies and legislation. And now, we are trying to influence time itself with potential changes to DST!
I share all this with you one month after National Golf Day (NGD) concluded on The Hill, where we had hundreds of golf course owners, superintendents, golf professionals, architects, builders, suppliers and more meeting with our elected officials and their staff. Something was different this time, and I’ve seen many NGDs. Today, we have members of the House and Senate working with and FOR us, rather than simply humoring us and our talking points. This is a big deal, folks. This means we have established ourselves where we need to be: a legitimate and important industry to the American people and economy. When Senator Ted Cruz, chair of the Commerce Committee, calls NGCOA for our opinion on Daylight Saving Time, which results in our appearance on the Hill, and when Senator Lindsey Graham’s office does the same just two weeks after my hearing appearance, you know the winds have changed.
Please know this, dear reader: NGCOA is working for ALL golf course owners and operators, not just the 4,000 dues-paying member facilities. And yet I hope our work appeals to you and proves worthy of your support by joining our organization, which has been around for fifty years. NGCOA is on a mission to expand our membership and grow our capacity — not for the sake of building an empire, but to build up our ability to tackle the ever-growing challenges we are facing. NGCOA will always remain “lean, mean and nimble,” but we want and need our membership roster to be as robust as possible. It helps us and it helps you. Join today at www.ngcoa.org/join
I hope you have a successful summer season!
Jay Karen, CAE
Chief Executive Officer
