FORT WORTH, Texas _ Some old guy once said, the times, they are a-changin'.
Never, perhaps, has that been truer than in the game of golf today.
This weekend's opening of Topgolf Fort Worth is a 65,000-square-foot sign of the new times. With the connected nature of our lives, both options and pulls on our time are at an all-time high. This renders, for some, a five-hour game too time-consuming.
Is there an app for that, we ask? To others, the barriers to entry seem too tall to even bother getting started with the painstaking pastoral pleasure of green-grass golf.
But we're still golf-crazy, and North Texas is still the only spot in the professional golf world that sustains two PGA Tour tournaments a mere 40 miles apart on back-to-back weeks. With the AT&T Byron Nelson and the Dean & DeLuca Invitational just two and three weeks away, respectively, it's like a new golf holiday popped up right before Christmas and New Year's.
Since Steve and Dave Jolliffe came up with the idea for "the driving range of the future, a bigger-than-life dartboard, but for golf" in 2000, Topgolf has been all about disrupting the golf market. It makes a party of what can be one of the most frustrating parts of learning golf: the hours spent at traditional driving ranges, monotonously hacking shots (hopefully) toward a flagstick in the distance, without ever being sure how close the ball actually came to it.
In doing so, it has provided a place where hackers can be hackers, the only slightly golf-y can remain slightly golf-y without putting on airs, and the totally uninitiated can pick up a club for the first time without the intimidation of the foursome behind them or a $100 green fee.
"I'm as traditional a golfer as they come," said Jon Drago, tournament director for the AT&T Byron Nelson. "And I'm fortunate that one of my daughters has a real love for the game. She plays at her high school. But my youngest daughter could care less about playing golf, and my wife could care less about playing golf. But we love going to Topgolf as a family. It brings in those who don't want to go through what it takes to play golf."
