Marcus has it down to tee with the driver
He described the nervous golfer on the green pacing back and forth around the line of the shot, feigning a pensive approach but really “putting off the evil moment as long as he possibly can”.
Then there was comedian Jack Benny who spoke for all of those honest enough to take or leave the absurd cruelty of the game: “Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner and you can keep my golf clubs and the fresh air.”
That touches on the common urge to send those clubs flying into the waterhazard that took your ball.
If only you could just send that driver back to where it came from, if only you could have chosen the Ping G25 instead of the TaylorMade R1.
Too much choice can be almost as frustrating as a round of golf but there’s a Cork-born entrepreneur who is making it his business to ease the pressure of both those horrors.
Marcus Spillane is the New York-based co-founder of GolfRedefined.com, a rapidly developing enterprise for golfers of all levels which he helpfully pitches as the “Netflix of golf”.
Benny would have loved it. Golf Redefined simply lets players try out a club for as long as they want before sending it back to be replaced by another model.
Spillane, who was born in Crosshaven and is a self-described “passionate average golfer”, partnered with a former college-level player from Canada, Lorne Fierbach to set up the company last year.
“It’s an idea he had for quite a while,” Spillane told me from his office on Monday. “We were looking to pivot out of a previous business and thinking about what we might do and this just seemed like a good opportunity.
“You can go into a golf shop and hit the ball into a launch monitor and you can get feedback on your swing but the reality is that it’s very difficult to have a driver over a limited number of days and weeks where you can try it out in different conditions — one day when it’s raining, another day when it’s sunny or one when you’re feeling great or another when you’re not feeling so good.
“One thing we’re trying to hone in on is the situation where a player spots a club in his friend’s bag and asks if they can have a go off it. That’s the psychology we’re trying to pick up on.”
Spillane has been living in New York for just over two years but doesn’t see any possibility of bringing a golf club delivery space back home (although he does retain many ties including another sporting hat: his presidency of theInternational 49er Class Association, one of the 10 Olympic Sailing Classes).
“80% of golfers in Ireland are members of clubs,” he explains, “which means they generally have access to the golf pro at those clubs. So they can probably get their hands on a driver and play a round or two with it if they wanted to. It’s not as easy as that but it’s possible.
“Only 20% of the equivalent types of player in the US are members of golf clubs which means that 80% of the playing population doesn’t have quite the same access as you would have in Ireland or the UK so their ability to get a driver like this is more limited. There are almost 26 million golfers in the US. Ireland has a total population of five million so it’s hard to see anything like this paying off. Even in the UK, the shipping costs are prohibitive compared to the US.”
They estimate that eightmillion of those American golfers are “avid” — playing over 25 rounds a year, spending $18.7 billion a year, $3.5b goes on equipment and just over a billion dollars being spent on drivers alone.
Golfers, like most of the rest of us, are increasingly going online, and as he keeps repeating, the Netflix approach is as close to an internet age no-brainer as there is but the hard slog begins now, spreading the word and seeking investment on an idea that seems to be working well.
“To reach out to golfers is an extremely expensive proposition because the top brands are all trying to reach the same people,” Spillane accepts.
“They’re networking people, they’re generally male, high-income. So it’s very difficult to compete in terms of pure advertising. We have to work through partnerships, through guerilla marketing — for the want of a better phrase — and we have to engage with golfers through forums.
“It’s not for everybody. There are many golfers who have so much money, they couldn’t care less how many drivers they have. But for everyone else, this is a good way to do it.”
*johnwriordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
