Lockdown diaries guest Grant Hepburn, the CEO of GolfRSA, has been at the centre of the process towards golf’s safe reopening. He tells WADE PRETORIUS about the current landscape facing the game.
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Lockdown Diaries: GolfRSA CEO Grant Hepburn
With golf’s proposal still sitting with government, the lockdown consequences on the industry could have devastating effects.
It is some time now since the initial three-week lockdown to help flatten the curve with clubs surveyed at that time already painting a bleak picture. Only a shade above one in every three clubs were be able to pay permanent employees if the lockdown was extended to six weeks. Part of the findings of that survey was that 31% of clubs did not believe they will survive the six-week (or longer) period. On top of the list of challenges facing the industry was that the numbers tallied did not account for the 12 000-18 000 vulnerable staff, who are not full time workers like caddies, waitering staff and other ad hoc workers.
While GolfRSA stepped in to help that breach, CEO Grant Hepburn is aware of the significant threat to industry.
‘I think that the harsh reality is, there’s already some golf clubs that have closed down,’ he told Compleat Golfer.
‘There will be more to follow, and one has to wonder if even a large golf club is safe. If I can name one, let’s say Royal Johannesburg. You look at a successful club like that, to trade successfully, but one has to remember that they have a massive expense every month.
‘They’ve got a huge number of workers and people that are employed. So the bigger, more successful clubs also have bigger expenses. Time will tell. We’re not sure where this will end. There will be casualties on the way; it’s a sad and harsh reality. All we can do is take it a day at a time, try and plan as best we can even though there’s a lot of uncertainty. When you talk about what we thought at best was a three-week lockdown then five weeks. We don’t know where this is going, because of the fact that the virus spread so easily.’
As a long-time instruction contributor to Compleat Golfer, Hepburn can see similarities in trying to fix a swing and winning the battle against Covid-19.
‘You know, when we went into lockdown, one of the things I thought about – and maybe this comes from my golf coaching background – was where we need to understand cause and effect. And when I thought of the fact that we’re going into lockdown because of this virus, I’d immediately start thinking about the fact that if you’re slicing a golf ball, there can be a thousand things that cause it, so what is the actual thing that you have to fix to stop that ball slicing?
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‘If you don’t fix that, the ball still slices. I mean what I realized was that the cause of this is the virus itself and I thought well if you don’t fix the virus how are you going to stop it? And then you start to understand that, well, possibly until you have a fix, how are you gonna go back to normal life? So for me, I think it was evident that the risk of going beyond three and five weeks
was definitely there because the reality is how do you find a vaccine or cure in short space of time and it’s not that easy.
‘So we’re looking at an extended period of time from that respect. Fortunately, the scientists and everyone are working as hard as they can, and I think people need to be real around this and understand that a cure or a vaccine is not necessarily coming quickly.’
