This is ridiculous. Golf is a sport that you can play from when you first start walking, until nearly the day you die. That's the appeal.
It requires extreme concentration in a way that I've never experienced in any other sport I've ever played.
I would highly, highly recommend that people learn to play golf. I wish it didn't have the stigma that it does with some people.
You’ve never considered that Golf has an actual price to it, while most poorer kids just play soccer with a single leather ball on the street, costing less than a dollar for dozens of kids?
Fred Couples (Hall of Famer) grew up in Seattle, biked to Jefferson Park Golf Course during the summer every day with $5 in hand from his mother, played a round of golf for $3.50 and got a burger and a coke with the remaining $1.50.
Some courses (including aforementioned Jefferson) will have free or heavily discounted rounds for junior golfers after some cutoff time in the afternoon.
$3.50 in 1972 (when Fred Couples was 13) is equivalent to around $20 today. (and $1.50 is now around $8.75)
Lincoln Park in SF charges weekday rates of $13 for a resident junior (or $20 for a non-resident)
Harding Park charges $20 for a resident Junior.
The burger will cost a little more, Harding Park's grill charges $14 for a burger... though Nachos or a Quesadilla are available for $9.
Old clubs are very easy to come by (relatives, craisglist, loaners). The main thing that I feel is being overlooked on this thread is that balls can be had for free, given the child puts a small amount of time in to look for them. Walk along the tree line of any fairway in the world and it will not be long before you've found enough balls to fill your front pockets.
Golf is like animé - it's the fans that make it insufferable.
But I dislike most sports that seem contrived (archery is a real skill that became a sport because the skill is not needed, golf is just a made up game as far as I can tell).
I'm not a golfer but you might compare that concentration to what is required for archery, which I'm learning, and high power rifle marksmanship, which I learned when I was young. Golf's stigma doesn't approach that of shooting sports, depending on one's location/social circles.
"The facility won top honors in the 1996 Superior Achievement for Excellence in Environmental Engineering competition sponsored by the American Academy of Environmental Engineering, which cited Harborside for addressing "the major criteria of the competition ... most important was the manner in which it met environmental and ecological concerns and contributed to an improved environment, using available materials to reverse perceived abuses and achieved significant cost reduction and control in course construction.""