H
ole 5 at the Balboa Park Golf Course is a sloping nightmare. Option one is to
drive your ball a bit to your left where it will (hopefully) come to a rest on the edge of a steep hillside. Option two is a bit hairier but is likely the better choice: drill the ball straight into the wooded area that is past the crest of the hill. It’s flatter terrain, but the wild card is all the natural obstacles (trees/bushes/ brush) that you will have to avoid hitting on your second shot. I opted for the flat,
wooded area but failed miserably at even reach- ing that. I watched my ball accelerate down the grassy hillside, and I mourned the failure of my plan. I was now at the bottom of the hill and still probably a good 100 yards from the hole. Another hard shot proved inadequate in getting my ball over the edge of the hillside where the hole awaited. It got about 10 feet from freedom before it nose-dived another
Like the economy, and Tiger’s golf game, the industry has
50 yards or so back down the hill. The third shot finally did it. I sent that damn ball to a location over the hillside, where it would finally stay put. A couple putts later and that baby was in the hole. My leg was sore but the hill had been conquered. The battle was over. “Leg?”
deteriorated
you ask. For- give me for not mentioning that I was play- ing footgolf, a hybrid sport
that combines the gameplay of golf with the use of a tra- ditional size five soccer ball. In this sport your kicking leg gets a monstrous workout. And hills are footgolfers’ arch-nemeses. Friction will
Ariel Fajerman first learned about footgolf in Argentina
cause a 1.6-ounce golf ball to stop rolling even on inclined grass, but a one-pound soccer
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ball will keep rolling downhill. I first learned about
footgolf in 2014, when it was
mentioned in a segment on HBO’s Real Sports. The news report was on the future of golf in the United States, and the outlook was bleak. The golf industry enjoyed massive growth during the pre-reces- sion/Tiger Woods era. But like the economy, and Tiger’s golf game, the industry has deteriorated. The HBO seg- ment offered some alarming statistics: 130 American golf courses had closed every year for the past eight years, a golf course closes somewhere in America every 48 hours, retail was off by double digits for each of the past three years, and TV ratings for some of the game’s biggest tourna- ments had been in steady decline since 2012. The root of the issue:
dwindling numbers of young golfers. Mark King, president of the TaylorMade golf com- pany, stated that the participa- tion of 18–30-year-olds was “down 35 percent in the last 10 years.” He followed that
PHOTOGRAPH BY SYDNEY PRATHER
28 San Diego Reader November 3, 2016
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