Introducing ‘Big Hole Golf,’ The Game For People Who Just Won’t Get Better At Golf

Back in March, during Stephen Colbert’s hilarious Sport Report mockery of the Washington Redskins that eventually landed him in lukewarm water with Twitter activists, he briefly discussed how golf executives at the PGA Merchandise Show finally wised up and decided that it’s time to make their beloved-but-incredibly-f*cking hard sport more inclusive to the common American. One such effort is a movement known as HackGolf, which is trying to make golf more fun and a little less intimidating to newcomers who just “aren’t having fun.”

Specifically, HackGolf is an “open-innovation initiative aimed at crowdsourcing the future of the game,” which is a really fancy way of saying that they started a message board to get people to offer new ideas to make golf easier. For example, as Colbert pointed out, one user suggested nets around the green for a-holes like me who have a terrible short game and constantly turn par and birdie approaches into triple bogeys. Another: “Free beer.” But perhaps the biggest idea thus far has come from TaylorMade CEO Mark King, whose company helped create HackGolf, as he created new 15-inch holes for something that he calls “Big Hole Golf.”

“Hack Golf was born of the idea from a few of us in the industry that we need new ideas,” said King. “Because if we have the same people that have been around the industry like myself, thinking about the same challenges, you pretty much have the same solutions. And it’s just not working. You don’t have new people coming into the game. So we’ve got to find a new experience that brings people into the game. And the 15-inch golf is just one idea that was born from that, which makes putting easier, makes it less intimidating, cuts the time down by about a third and you have a lot more fun.” (Via Oddity Central)

Even PGA of America President Ted Bishop said that he’s on board, as he compared it to the game of H-O-R-S-E, in terms of any random shmuck being able to play it. And here’s a brief video to show you just how easy it is to get out there and cheat yourself out of the learning experience.

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