In early April, the doomsday preppers were loading up on Pro V1s and installing putting mats in their fallout bunkers for the long cold winter while this virus closed the courses and golf retail outlets across the globe. The rumors of product releases being canceled and suppliers going under were swirling with more momentum every day.

It was going to be a race to the bottom for retail prices as the manufacturers did their darndest to get rid of stock to enthusiasts not likely to play golf for the foreseeable future.

Bryson didn’t know his favorite flavor of protein shake, and Hideki was about to run away with the Players Championship. The Masters was postponed, and everything was going wrong.

In Australia, April was a complete write-off. Courses allowed to remain open were thin on the ground, and people lucky enough to get on the course were unable to play competitions and were restricted to two-person groups. Retail sales were almost non-existent, and the bar sales leading up to Easter, and so often the life-blood of golf clubs, were no longer.

Then, one by one in Australia and the U.S., the states reopened their courses. There were new innovations to get balls out of the hole without touching the flagstick, and even the tour started again. Predictions about the death of golf seemed to have been wildly exaggerated, and if anything, golf had been working out in the off-season and was coming out of isolation looking as good as when Tiger was winning tournaments in 2000!

With golf on the very short list of approved activities during COVID-19 restrictions, golf was now the Steven Bradbury of sports, sliding to the gold medal as all the others were far too socially close to remain in action.

People who previously had golf as a third, fourth, or fifth priority were all of a sudden out of alternatives and golf courses, and driving ranges were some of the only outdoor activities available. If you were lucky enough to be a member of a course, you had to be online the minute the timesheet went live, or you were out in the cold for another week.

So, the April showers brought the May flowers to golf in more ways than one. It has been written in other articles that Australian courses, in particular, were welcoming new members in their droves in the middle of an Australian winter! Not since Adam Scott won his Masters in 2013 has there been a shift in members to this extent during these hibernation months.

Another story told of new players venturing to a driving range wanting to borrow clubs. When they learnt that restrictions meant they couldn’t do so, they went to the nearest golf store and bought new ones before returning for a hit.

This has flowed through to suppliers who were previously running on seven-day custom build timelines, now pushing out over 14 days due to the combination of incredible demand, and challenges getting stock prioritized out of (mainly) China.

May and June have now been the equivalent of two Christmas months back to back with sales spreading across hardgoods and softgoods alike. It isn’t quite the same as the toilet paper aisle in the first weeks of the pandemic, but it is exponentially better than the projected nuclear winter which was written about.

Now it is up to golf to take advantage into the mid and long term. Other sports will progressively return, but this has pulled in a demographic of players who were otherwise not going to hit the links until their knees and backs gave way in 10-20 years time. Others who have come to the course were previously disillusioned players who have had their enthusiasm re-awoken with the lack of football, hockey, baseball or other sports which would have otherwise taken up their weekends.

New golfers are buying at least some new stuff, and returning golfers have spotted that their clubs from college probably weren’t right for them. Also, now the money that was going on those other sports or memberships has gone straight into a new Driver/Iron set/Putter/ Bag or all of the above.

The biggest benefit may yet turn out to be a brand new generation of golfers who would have been going to play (and adopt) other sports and activities rather than heading to the course with their parents. It has been far easier to convince my young daughters to come to the course when there are no dance classes or museums or libraries to compete with!

Many of us have stories of parents or grandparents taking us to the golf course during holidays and that turning into our lifelong addiction, so we may look back on 2020 as giving birth to a whole generation of golfers! The Masters champion of 2035 could well have been a dancer, or a gymnast, or a footballer, or a baseball player if it had not been for COVID-19 restrictions.

While it isn’t a universal river of gold for everyone in golf, it is definitely on the shortlist of industries that could end up coming out in front once the dust settles from the COVID-19 virus.

So with short term gains looking likely, it is now a question of how golf can keep all of these golfers coming back to the course, or the range, or the minigolf courses, or the simulators that were struggling to bring anyone through the gates in 2019.