2017 Golfdom Report: Talking Trump

With the benefit of two months of introspection as a guide, readers say Trump will have some benefit for the business.

We were in panic mode two months ago, trying to wrap our minds around Donald Trump’s surprise victory. We were on the phone trying to get quotes, thoughts and insights on what Trump means for the industry.

This month, we’re better prepared — to the tune of 500-plus reader votes and a dozen one-on-one interviews with superintendents.

So, what do readers think Trump’s win means for the industry? Call it cautious optimism.

“I think he’ll be a positive, and in a couple different arenas,” says Ralph Kepple, CGCS, longtime superintendent at East Lake GC in Atlanta, host course of the Tour Championship. “(Trump’s) Environmental Protection Agency administrator choice (Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt) is going to change (the EPA’s) direction, which honestly needed to be changed. That can only be good.”

More than 40 percent of Golfdom readers agree with Kepple, stating that “things will improve” for the golf industry under Trump’s regime. Most readers, 55 percent, believe it will not change the business, with only 4 percent (the equivalent of 20 of the 500-plus respondents) stating they believe Trump will have a negative effect on the industry.

Kepple says that besides an improved EPA, he believes Trump will go further to support small business. Chuck Connolly, superintendent at the Club at Brookstone in Anderson, S.C., believes Trump brings good things and bad things to the office, but agrees that his dedication to small business will be a positive for golf.

“Overall, I do think he’s going to be good for the golf business. He’s a smart businessman — especially small business — he looks out for those small business owners,” Connolly says. “That’s probably the one thing that’s hurt golf on the national scale. We’re really running small businesses. I think if he can help the small business owners, I think he’s going to help golf in general.”

California superintendent Josh Heptig, who recently won GCSAA’s President’s Award for Environmental Stewardship, says he will keep an open mind but is doubtful Trump can accomplish all he promised.

“For me, it’s a wait and see,” says Heptig, superintendent at Morro Bay GC, Chalk Mountain GC and Dairy Creek GC in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “I’m not sure the things he ran on, the agendas he was talking about… I will be curious to see if any of them actually come to fruition. I think he could be beneficial in some regard because there are a lot of regulations, particularly in my neck of the woods in California — EPA issues, regulatory issues, labor laws — that could change depending upon his agenda and cabinet members he puts into place.”

For all the talk about the election results, Trump’s Twitter habits and Russia’s alleged hacking of the election, Connolly neatly brings the whole thing back down to earth. At the end of the day, he notes, golf needs to solve its own problems.

“We’ve got a lot to overcome industry wise, not just from a presidents’ standpoint,” he says. “We’ve got to attract more people to the business from a participation standpoint, we’ve got to become more culturally diverse to get more people out to experience golf, and really these four-to-five-hour rounds, kids nowadays, it’s iPads and computers. They’re not going to disconnect for four and a half hours. We’ve got to overcome that, and that’s not going to happen with the presidency as much as it has to happen within the industry itself. We’ve got to become more proactive.”