And another fact of the matter is once serious money gets involved, that good thing isn't good to a lot of people anymore and there's a shakeout. You can only hope that by the time it gets to that point you have a plentiful number of folks who don't remember the good ol' days before the yuppies came in and ruined everything. You only need to look at our big brother sport and the state its in for a not so shining example.
In my earlier post I criticized ball golf, but that mostly was for the formality of it. I think that formality came about because the sport has always been associated with the upper classes. It has predominantly been a rich man's game.
In contrast, disc golf was started by a very less glamorous crowd. A lot of hippies and casual outdoor enthusiasts and the game is still mostly played in free public parks. So we're really at the opposite end of the spectrum from ball golf.
Beyond that formality, I don't think anything has gone particularly wrong with ball golf. It's a great sport, has great mind share, and has great courses. You might balk at the greens fees I guess. I'm not advocating that we always have to be $20 to play a round of disc golf.
But I don't think the fundamental hippie nature of the sport is likely to change. I think of it like Tango. Tango was first created in Europe, failed to gain any attention amongst the upper classes, and was then adopted and changed by the rough working class of Buenos Aires. After several decades, the dance became quite renown amongst the upper class in Buenos Aires (who viewed themselves very European) and they began to incorporate it. Now Tango is one of the most popular and distinguished dance and music styles in the world. Yet when I was in Buenos Aires, there were tens of Tango Clubs where the locals just show up and dance, working class and all, and it hasn't changed hardly a white in 100 years. The "soul" of Tango came out of the poor and it has never lost that feeling.
I think the same will always be true of disc golf. There will always be free parks to play, and I don't think we'll ever see rules about white pants, polo shirts, and golf carts become the norm when you want to just throw. I think we're safe from that.
However, that was a good point about private companies coming in just for the $ and kicking out small business owners who love the sport. I expect that would/could happen; it isn't clear to me that that's a bad thing, per se. But I guess the risk is that the people who care would be run out and go do something else. Then the people who don't care *might* not do as good a job, so people stop spending their money there, and then the non-caring people leave ("there wasn't any money in it") but the original caring folks are busy doing something else and don't come back.
But, ball golf appears to have successfully gotten past all that. When I played regularly there were great public courses, you could get a solid tee time, everyone pretty much knew the rules, and everything was maintained. It was a really positive experience. I just hated the upper-crustiness of the whole thing.
Food for thought. To the comment about a ball golf course not being that much fun to play: I agree that most ball golf courses are too big and too open to warrant a great experience on the normal fairways. But by making the sandtraps OB, and using the edges of the fairways (where there are often a lot of trees) I think it could be really interesting. I guess what I am imagining are disc golf courses that have the beauty of a ball golf course, but scaled down and laid out a bit differently to make a better fit for discs. Using sandtraps as OB for me would be preferable to a lot of the cruddy marshes and creeks where I lose discs. And because sandtraps can be sculpted, it would be easy to create some really interesting holes that way.
