"Increasingly, golf is lost in the small print"

Derek Lawrenson writes about the depleted writing force in the UK where only two full-time golf writers are employed by Fleet Street.

There’s me, now working for the Daily Mail; and James Corrigan, who works for the Daily Telegraph. Perhaps the last of us standing – probably him, since he’s ten years younger – will come up with a book and call it Last Writes.

You don’t have to be a Fleet Street nostalgia merchant to be saddened by this state of affairs. The shrinkage of golf tournaments in this country has seen the sport slip down the newspaper priority list for a number of reasons, and all of them add up to being bad for golf. Whether it’s for budgetary reasons – few papers, in these cash-strapped times, can afford to send journalists to cover regular tournaments in places like China or America – or the fact it’s easier to dismiss events in far-flung places rather than on your doorstep, it’s a fact that column inches devoted to the sport have shrunk dramatically. There are no winners when there is less publicity.

And yet the audience is still out there. In a recent survey of over 5,000 golfers, only the amount of golf coverage in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph scored even satisfactory marks.