Publishing Editor

The golf course has been one of Western Europe’s better job factories. The continent now has some 6m golfers, who spend an average of $1,700 a year each on their addiction. This $10 billion golf industry is already bigger than wine-making – and it accounts for roughly 150,000 jobs. A biggish course can employ 50 people directly – to say nothing of the architects, construction staff, equipment suppliers, clothing makers, golf writers and other hangers on.

Recently, this success story has run into the rough. Part of the problem is over-expansion. In 1992 alone, 255 new golf courses opened in Western Europe, nearly 6% of the total ever built there. Once open, few golf courses actually close: running costs are far smaller than building costs. But many keep going courtesy of their bankers. “A lot of people have had their fingers burned in the golf boom,” says Michael Ford of Golf Enterprise Europe, a publishing company. In Britain, Compton Holdings, which as backed by Peter Alliss, a golf commentator, and was developing a dozen or so courses, recently went bust.

Although the recession is partly to blame, so are the course designers. The continent relative beginners have been confronted with punishingly difficult courses, where woods and lakes swallow up their balls. Some 93% of French golfers have a handicap of 16 or more – ie they hack. These failed Faldos want easy courses, near cities, nine cheap-and-cheerful holes rather than 18 dear-and-difficult ones. France is now embarked on a programme to build 100 golf courses where green fees are around FFr100 ($12). In America, whose golf industry is twice as big as Europe’s. four in five new courses are the easier kind Joe Public wants, at an average green fee of $24 a go.

Another problem is that most European golf courses are owned by individual developers. In America and Japan bigger firms dominate. Now these outsiders are invading Western Europe. Japanese firms already own several smart new clubs around London as well as the Penha Longha club in Portugal, which boasts five villages, 26 greenkeepers (for 18 holes) and an irrigation system controlled by satellite. Membership is a pinch at $36,000.

As America’s home market matures – it had 14,375 courses at the end of 1992, 18 holes for every 22,000 golfers, compared with 18 for every 84,000 in Europe – big firms are turning their eyes to Europe. For example, Club Corporation International is the world’s largest golf-club operator, with revenues of $850m in 1993: Jim Maser, the head of ClubCorp Europe, says he has been “nosing around for a year and a half trying to learn the markets”. He expects his first deal this year, with Britain, France, Spain and Italy his targets. American Golf Corporation has just bought four British courses from the defunct Compton Holdings. The big airline companies and hotel chains will not be far behind.

With the prices of golf clubs still falling and much of the hard work already done, profits are there to be had. “It’s not the first, or even the second owner of a golf course who makes the money,” argues Colin Hegarty of the Golf Research Group. “It’s the third owner.” Bad luck for the entrepreneurs who first sent in the bulldozers. But good for the army of workers who earn a living from the appetite for hitting a ball into a hole with a stick.

The development of high-tech, top-quality golf clubs has inspired a vast new industry of imitators – but now the leading manufacturers, angry at being ripped off, are fighting back. PETER HIGGS reports on the battle.
Most weekends during the winter Derek loads his van and heads for a hotel somewhere in the south of England.

He operates on the fringes of the law, risking criminal prosecution and civil writs.

Twice he has been fined for unauthorised advertising, and has received writs and threatening letters from major companies.

Yet the 30-year-old wheeler-dealer will not be deterred, adamant that he entitled to make a living.

For Derek trades in golf club copies, selling clubs which are near replicas of the top brand names but, at £150 a set, cost a quarter of the price.

He is the front line of a multi-million pound counterfeiting industry which has rocked golf.

It is a world-wide issue which has grown dramatically in Britain over the past few months. Now the campaign to stamp out the problem, involving private investigators, undercover agents and specialist lawyers, is being stepped up.

“The public are being conned,” said one leading manufacturer. “They’re confused by being offered clubs which appear to be the real thing when they’re not.”

Escalating costs of the top brands have enabled copies to thrive. The fact that they trade on the image of the leading brands without using the same materials or precision construction angers the manufacturers, who feel their ideas are being stolen and their reputations damaged.

A recent survey by the Golf Research Group revealed that copies are the best-selling irons in Britain. In sales of woods, copies are second behind Callaway.
The imitation clubs are manufactured in Taiwan – where six offenders were recently jailed – and mainland China. Once they reach selling points around the world, the deception takes several forms.

Counterfeiting, in which clubs are sold as if they are top brands, is the most serious. California-based Callaway have set up a special unit, “The Callaway Police”, and spent $3million to root out the conmen, gaining considerable success in America, Japan and Malaysia.

In Britain, where counterfeiting is a criminal offence which could lead to prison, the car boot salesmen and Sunday traders use a ploy of ‘passing off’.

The clubs, known as ‘knock-offs’, are slight variations but carry similar names, appearance and logos to the top brands. The Callaway Big Bertha metal driver, for example, sells for around £250 compared to the Canterbury Big Bursar at £70.

The makers retaliate by taking civil action, claiming infringement of their trademarks and clubhead design. And the writs are flying.

Callaway, whose top player is European No.1 Colin Montgomerie, issued writs against nine British companies this month. Cobra Golf followed with eight writs against UK distributors. Ping, Taylor Made and Lynx are also putting up a fight.

In the past two years Cobra, makers of Greg Norman’s clubs, have spent £150,000 in Britain pursuing 11 successful lawsuits.

The most common copies of King Cobra clubs, which cost up to £950 a set, are King Snake and Lady Viper (at about £150 a set).

“The average golfer is being misled into thinking that these clubs are direct copies of the real thing and will perform the same and last as well. They don’t,” said Peter Thompson-Smith, managing director of Cobra Golf UK.
“Some are even told that the clubs are made by Cobra, which is not only untrue but likely to prove costly if the clubs need repair.”

The discount club merchants claim, however, that the big companies are adopting bully-boy tactics to hit their business.

Robert Rata, whose company Rata and Rata specialises in the cheaper range at 42 stores, has received writs for copying but denies that he sells imitations.

“A golf club is a golf club,” said Rata. “The big companies say that we are ripping them off, but they are ripping off the public by charging such massive prices.”

But on Friday, lawyers for Taylor Made golf clubs issued a statement that Rata and Rata had agreed to remove copies of Taylor Made clubs from their shelves and promised not to put them on sale in the future.

Meanwhile , the big guns’ failure to present a united front is hindering their campaign. An approach by Cobra to join forces with Callaway to fight the counterfeiters was snubbed because they are rivals.

And as Sunday salesman Derek explained: “If I get a writ from one manufacturer, I stop selling those copies and move onto another one.”

Neither the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA), whose members sell the stock, nor the R&A, who run the game, want to be involved.

Derek, meanwhile, will be out there today, doing business as usual.