October 8, 2025 • 48 mins
Robert Brown, founder of GolfbyKids, joins Rich to discuss why junior golf has been so important to him and how GolfbyKids helps advance the game for kids.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Rich Comwell Golf Show. This week, we
are going to spend all of our time together talking
about junior golf, and I am joined by Robert Brown.
Robert is the founder of Golf by Kids, and Robert
is probably actually not probably is the most passionate person
(00:25):
I have ever met about creating opportunities in junior golf
and growing the game of golf through junior golf. And
we are going to spend a considerable amount of time
talking about junior golf and how to grow junior golf
and probably touch on some of the things that are
wrong with junior golf. But first off, Robert, thank you
for joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Rich thank you. I appreciate it. It's a great opportunity
and whatever we can do to get what I believe
the goal should be is every kid in America competent
in junior golf while they're a child, so they can
carry that skill for life.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Well that is a that's a fascinating that's les let's
get let's all right, So let's start there. So how
did you get here? Because obviously you're not a kid,
I mean, obviously you're advocating Golf by Kids, and I
understand all that, but tell me how you got to
this level of passion.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Very simple. I was not invited into the game by
the golf establishment from a junior golf perspective. We found
it on our own, which is the normal pattern in golf.
Is not necessarily the establishment people doing things that get
kids into golf. It's parents who come into it by
(01:47):
their own journey. So what happened in my case was
that we bought golf clubs for our kids in December
for Christmas of two thousand and six, and we then
that day or the next day, we went to the
golf course and hit some balls or whatever, and then
the clubs went in the closet because we were playing baseball.
(02:11):
And then after baseball season comes summer, and over that
summer I decided more in the interests of saving the
money of a camp, because anybody that has children knows
that in summertime you're looking for camps to put your
kids in because there's no school. And so I was
looking for a way to avoid the cost, which is
(02:35):
usually about five hundred dollars a kid, and so I
created a golf camp. And the golf camp structure was
five days where the kids went to the restaurant, to
the putting green, to the driving range, and then we
went and played nine holes on a thousand yard part
three course, went home, went back in the afternoon to
the putting green, driving range, played another nine holes in
(02:55):
the afternoon, and then went to the restaurant again, but
this time for a float to end the day. So
when I set this program up, I was not sure
the kids were going to make it because they'd never
played golf before, and how in the hell are they
going to play golf eighteen holes a day for five
days straight. I wasn't sure I was going to be
(03:16):
able to make it. So lo and behold, they went
through the week and Saturday morning, at seven o'clock, they're
in my bedroom going, Dad, Dad, let's go. The course
is open, Let's go to the restaurant and hit balls.
And that was in August of two thousand and seven,
and then their first tournament. Basically after that, every day
(03:37):
when I picked them up from school, I would say,
what do you guys want to do? Oh, we want
to go play golf, dad. So we would go play
the nine hole course, which we could do because it
would take, you know, ninety minutes you know, one hundred
minutes an hour and a half less than two hours.
So if I picked them up at three point thirty,
we could be done with golf by five thirty before
(03:58):
you know, mom got home, right, And so every day
that became our routine. And I was fascinated that they
started to become pretty good players pretty quickly. And so
they played their first tournament in December two thousand and seven,
and it went on from there that they played all
(04:20):
the way through college. They won. All three of my
children have gone on to college golf programs. My daughter
is now an NCAA champion from George Fox. So along
the way, I've seen it all, and the whole junior
golf system is messed up. It has some shining stars
(04:44):
in it. Most of it is because of individuals like
me that have gone and started things, you know, individual
junior golf programs. Most of the great things in golf
and junior golf haven't been started by the establ They
were grassroots efforts started by individuals who didn't have any
(05:05):
things available for their kids. So they'd said, well, look,
why don't we start a little tournament somewhere and have
a few kids play and that's kind of the story
of golf by kids. How it got started was because
my children were trying to gain entry that they deserved
because they were good players, into the Junior World in
(05:27):
San Diego. But unfortunately the qualifying for the Junior World
is now gotten to the point where it's a torture test.
I can show you an example. I'll send you the
link after if you want to see it. But there
was a twelve year old boy that went out and
shot five hunder par for eighteen holes in a qualifier
(05:47):
and didn't qualify for Junior World. Oh my god, that's
a stunning thing. That should that should shake anybody that's
involved in golf getting paid in the golf industry. That
stat should shape them to the core that they set
up a system of qualifying. We're a twelve year old
(06:07):
boy shot five hunder par and did not succeed.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
That's unbelievable. That's that's that's that's that's scary. That's scary.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Tell you that in the in the qualifying. So I'll
stay on that topic for a second. In qualifying, there
was I can send you another link where my two
sons went to qualify some golf course for Junior World.
There were five spots, and I think there were sixty
or seventy kids, sixty or seventy boys, and my sons
(06:42):
took two of the five spots, and I was broken
hearted because I knew that the reason that my kids
succeeded over the others largely was because we're wealthy and
we can afford more range baels, We can afford better equipment,
we can have aford more lessons, we can afford more tournaments.
(07:03):
So we won just because of our wealth. And these
other kids, great kids, working hard, but maybe their families
didn't have as much wealth, and so they got kicked
to the curb and the Brown family. Out of those
sixty or seventy spots, we took two of them, and
I was broken hard about it. I don't like that.
(07:24):
I like it to me. To me, golf ought to
be more judged on a standard that stays the same
and encourage more and more kids to get over that standard.
So let's just call it the four minute mile. If
you can run a four minute mile, you're freaking awesome.
We don't care that the world record for the mile
(07:46):
is now below three fifty. We're not going to worry
about that. What we're going to worry about is any
kid that can run the four minute mile. And I
wouldn't even say in golf the standard needs to be
that difficult. And what I would argue Rich is that
the golf industry, the elites, are perverted today. They are
(08:07):
perverted in the pursuit of taking one more stroke off
the score of some junior golfer who has now had
to give up everything else in their life simply to
pursue that one last stroke. The USGA has a national
development program. They're spending now over six million dollars a year.
(08:31):
It's growing every year. They are out vacuuming up money
from companies, know their sponsors. They're basically doing what Amazon
is doing to the small businesses. They're just using their
resources to suck up every junior golf dollar there might be,
(08:52):
and they're now spending it on what they call a
national development program. And you can read the literature on itself.
Of the coaches has stated the goal is that they
want their National Development Team member to win the gold
medal in golf.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
MH.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
But you know we already have Scottie Shuffler. Okay, we
already have We do you know, Xander, I don't know
why you would worry about that when we have kids
going into schools and shooting blindly and killing children, or
any other number of examples. We have kids struggling in
this country, desperately, desperately, and the USGA is focused on
(09:37):
shaving half a stroke or quarterstroke off of some kid
so they can win the Olympics in four years. Yeah,
it's perverted. It really is perverted. They are so insulated
in upon themselves they have no clue they There are
just so many areas I could breach. One of them
(09:59):
is discrimination against girls, and you would go, You would
ask yourself, how is it that in twenty twenty five
the golf industry would be knowingly discriminating against girls, even
to the point that Robert Brown points it out to
them and how wrong it is, and they ignore me,
(10:21):
to ignore any they just go on their mission. Well,
anybody can go and look at the US Junior Amateur
for twenty twenty five, and the US boys field was
about two hundred and sixty players and the girls field
was about one hundred and fifty players. I could get.
I already sent you the exact aid on that. So
(10:43):
you have that in your hands. But there's about one
hundred spot difference between the girls Junior Amateur and the
boys Junior Amateur, which is played separately, separate times. Why
are they discriminating and holding back girls that way? Wow?
This is perverted?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah, this is this is interesting stuff. So let me
ask you this. Okay, So let me go back to
to one. Let me go one step backwards. Okay. So
my my thing with with kids is is is that
is that you know, there's a lot worse places for
kids to be than a golf course. And and my
(11:26):
thing is is, yeah, it would be great. I mean,
I've been fortunate enough to teach some young people that
went on to do some pretty good stuff. But the
fact of the matter is there are a lot of
kids walking around that that can say they learned how
to play or to enjoy. I guess I should say,
you know, from a program like mine. So I guess
(11:50):
maybe what I would say is what you're what you're
actually advocating. And I understand all the math, and I
get all that what you're really advocating is to actually
you whose golf as a way to improve society and
young society in the United States.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
If I was President Trump, I'd sign an executive order
tomorrow and encourage Congress to pass the law to make
golf a national service program. The kids would get involved in,
just like math or anything else. And all you have
to do is go to any junior golf tournament and
look at the kids and the way they dress and
the way they shake hands and take their hats off
(12:31):
after the round. What you saw at the Ryder Cup
was another example of the failure of the leadership in golf.
They egged that whole situation on no doubt and no
doubt destroying. They're destroying everything you see in junior golf.
It's like, as a parent, your heartbursts and you go,
(12:51):
this is exactly what I'm as a parenting tool. This
is exactly the way I want my kid to grow up.
And yet I've watched TV and I see that it's
ridiculous and the PGA has no one other than themselves
to blame for that.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Oh I agree with I'm a PGA. I'm a PGA member,
And I emailed Don Ray and told him that that
was embarrassing by the President blocked me.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Let me talk to you about Don Ray for a second.
I had a conversation with Don Ray. He eventually blocked
me on LinkedIn. I have one question for you, Don Ray,
and I'll do it publicly and I've asked him privately.
But my one question for Don Ray is, when you
sought the presidency of the PGA, what was your one
signature goal that you had in mind that you would
(13:40):
achieve during your term? What big thing were you going
to do to be remembered for Don has never answered
that question to me. If you're going to seek the
presidency of an organization as large as the PGA, you
should have some firmly set out goals to It's like,
(14:00):
and I don't mean to get political. I know there's
people on both sides. Yeah, the President Trump laid out
some purely defined goals that he had in mind, and
that's what he told the people that he was running upon.
I like that. I like to know why somebody is
running for something, what they're going to do. And Don Ray,
despite I can send the emails where I've asked him
(14:20):
that and he's never answered. And he finally blocked me
on LinkedIn. I talked to Don about golf by kids
and the PGA right now has what would be you know,
they would call it a golden opportunity. I would say
there's probably some metal way more valuable than gold, right,
(14:43):
And that's the opportunity'd been given by President Trump's election.
They have the biggest golf president in the history of
the universe. And that's an opportunity that would be like
if you if you know, Rockefeller was a the president,
and you wanted to talk about oil, the oil industry,
(15:06):
you know, or something.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I say, Tom Brady becomes president, you want to about football?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, time, Yeah, you'd have a pure thing. You'd have
a natural fit for football if Tom Brady became president.
Perfect example. So they had this opportunity, and what do
they spend their their collateral on. They spend it on
trying to kill live golf.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And if I can talk about live golf for a second,
they we're off junior golf. But it's related because the
PGA and the USGA and that sort of thing. I
started an initiative him even talk to you about called
Veritas World Junior and Veritas was designed to become the
world's largest annual international junior golf championship, with ten thousand
(15:51):
junior golfers from one hundred and fifty countries, five thousand boys,
five thousand girls, five thousand US and five thousand international.
The model was opening ceremonies in front of a Major
League Baseball game, where one of the kids in the
tournament would be randomly selected to throw out the first pitch.
We had a dugout kid randomly selected, and we had
(16:14):
a playball announcer that was randomly selected, so we had
some you know, fun things. I set up contracts with
the Dodgers and Angels, so we ran it for four years.
The first year was at Dodger Stadium and the following
three years were at Angel Stadium. The end of the
event was designed to go to Disneyland, where I would
(16:34):
have bought out Disneyland from Friday night for a private party.
You know, they do these high school nights at Disneyland.
So it was on that same kind of model, and
I got no support from the golf industry. I only
asked them for two things. I asked them for help
with rules officials, and I asked them for publicity because
(16:58):
they have the channels to right put things out worldwide.
My ultimate dream would have been for Jim Nants to
announce during the Master's coverage. Hey kids, Hey moms and dads.
They've got this big tournament in Los Angeles coming up
this summer. Check it out. Find a qualifying plus. And
(17:19):
I can tell you that I applied back to the
future technology to this tournament to make it the best
thing ever in terms of every dimension. One of the
key components was that I empowered local junior golf organizations
around the world by giving them for free the exemption
(17:43):
papers to get into the tournament, which were all by
serial number, so I could tell you exactly how each
child that came into the tournament qualified by looking up
that serial number. But what you're doing is you're offering
this big international event to the kids in your local community.
Now that worked for me because now I get to
(18:03):
spread the word and they're running qualifiers and spreading the brand,
and the PGA was completely disinterested. And what I would
argue with these guys is you guys are functionally a
monopoly or an oligopoly, or whatever you want to call it.
You control everything. You control media, you control the golf courses,
(18:25):
you control the big tournaments, you control access. They control
it all. And when you have that kind of control,
you have an obligation to go out and help people
that are you know.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
In that is that need help, that needs help. All right,
so here's what we're going to do. We're going to
take a break right now, and then when we come back,
we're going to keep talking about how we're going to
how we're going to use golf to to kind of
like improve well, actually we're going to to seep golf
into everybody's childhood. This is the Rich Coombwell Golf Show. Well,
(19:00):
welcome back to the Rich Combo Golf Show. I'm actually very,
very very excited this week because I am speaking with
Robert Brown, who is the founder of Golf by Kids,
but is extremely passionate about growing junior golf and growing
the game of golf. Were actually just growing junior golf,
(19:20):
then by extension golf would grow too. So what we
started to talk about was a lot of different things.
But Robert, I want to know, like how you see
you know, your beginning your beginning statement was, you know,
to make you know, golf part of every child, make
(19:43):
every junior competent in the game of golf, and what
we can argue over competency, you know, break one hundred
and break ninety, break eighty, break fifty. I don't know,
but but so how do we.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do that well? Break well? Competency is a great question,
And what I would argue from my standpoint is that
competency could be judged where a child can shoot even
par on a thousand yard part three course.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Perfect.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Now, most golf people, most people that involved in junior golf,
would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wha, that's too hard. That's ridiculous.
Shooting even par even for nine holes, that's that's just
way too hard. Well, I can tell you all three
of my children who shot five under for nine holes. Right,
that's hard, that's hard. But on a par three course
(20:37):
where you have a you know, a shorter iron into
each hold, and you can do that. It takes some work,
it takes some practice, but that's doable. But I would relent.
I would go, Okay, if you want to argue that,
let's make it thirty, let's make it three over par
or something. Right, And to me, when a kid the
golf industry should be set up so that when a
(20:59):
kid hits a competency goal, the golf industry should set
off some firework somewhere. But they don't they ignore all
those kids that are doing great things. The kid that
shot five under and didn't qualify for the Junior World
there was never any mention of that anywhere. He was just,
you know, to use Tiger's analogy, sec first loser. You know,
(21:23):
he was a loser in their world. So the way
you do it is the golf industry talks endlessly about
grow the.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Game, to grow golf mission statement.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
And they now are something I'm gonna, I'm gonna we'll
make a little joke, care to make to lighten the
mood a little bit? Uh My joke is what is
the And I'll ask you this, what is the largest
healthcare claim for the PGA and U s GA people.
You know, No, it's rotator cuff surgery. And you go, well,
(22:04):
why would that be Well, because they packed themselves on
the back with both arms twenty four hours a day
and they wear out their rotator cuff.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
That's awesome, that's awesome. That's funny, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
So it's true. I mean I was at the Junior
Golf dinner, you know, the awards dinner at the end
of season Southern California PGA, and the first thing they
did at the Junior Golf thing was start handing out
awards to each other, you know, all the managers, and
it was like who nominated who and who voted for who?
Nobody knew, right, we're just giving these awards to ourselves.
(22:39):
And you know, I want to say something loud and
clear too. This should be, this should resonate. Okay, this
should be, in my view, the biggest message of your day.
This is the most achievable biggest message of your day,
and that is that Dan van Horne should immediately be
installed in the World Golf Hall of Fame because Dan
(23:01):
van Horn has done more for golf in the past
and going on in the future than any other person
in the history of golf. Dan van Horn was not
given opportunities to play in Masters where he happened to
be the winner, like Jack Nicholas Arnold Palmer, who are
great people. Dan van Horn built something himself, and he
(23:24):
built it swimming upstream against the powers that probably didn't
want him to be successful, and he pursued it. He
now runs the biggest junior golf system in the world.
And I will thank Dan. I've thanked him many times
every time I chant get a chance I thank him.
But my daughter, who has issues that would keep her
(23:48):
out of golf, is only playing golf today and it's
an NCAA champion only because Dan van Horn believes that
parents should have the opportunity to go out and caddy
for their child, whereas most of the other industry believes
the child should just learn by themselves somehow. And so
(24:08):
I thank Dan van Horn. Dan van Horn, there should
be a movement somewhere to get him put in the
Hall of Fame, because there's a lot of people in
that Hall of Fame that nobody has ever heard of
and who have done practically nothing for golf, whereas Dan.
If you want to talk about grow the game, if
you removed everything that Dan did in golf and took
(24:29):
it away today, it would be a very interesting analysis
where golf would be today without Dan van Horn and
what he did individually. He built the whole thing from
the ground up, the whole system. I can't say enough
about Dan van Horn.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
He did.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
So you wanted to, I'm sorry, how do we do it?
So you wanted to talk about golf by kids. So
if you say you want to grow the game, and
if you're logical and you believe that the way to
grow the game is through kids, because teaching fifty year
(25:12):
olds how to play golf is not a very effective
way to grow your game. So you have kids that
you want to grow the game with. There is only
one rational answer that anybody could come to, and that
is that you have to take on building the courses
(25:33):
for the kids to play. And if you're going to
do that, you want to put in a system whereby
the kids can compete in a regular, rational way. And
that's what golf by kids is. Golf by kids is
called golf by kids because the kids play tournaments that
they run themselves. They are actually in charge. They do everything,
(25:59):
and it takes you know, if you start from day one.
Of course, you can't just open a course and tell
the kids to go run a tournament. It's probably not
going to run that well. But if you if you
present the proper technology to support them, and you you
work your way into it, and you have kids mentor
(26:22):
kids in other words, you need Once you know your job,
you have to teach two more kids. Right what your
job is? Whatever that if it's the rules official, then
you have to teach two other children how to be
a rules official. So on a part three course, obviously,
a rules official is a lot easier than it would
be at the Ryder Cup.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
It's sixty yeah, it's sixty six hundred yards, or sixty
two hundred yards is seventy four hundred yards, right, it's
a lot easier. It's a lot easier when you can
walk fifty feet and get the next hole.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
No, no, no, no, Golf by Kids it's part three.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
No, I know that, I know one. No, I know that.
So what I'm saying, I'm agreeing with you. So so
obviously I can.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
I can.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
I can rules official nine par phraise pretty much by
myself because I just walk Timmy's got a problem, I'll
walk over there. Janey's got a problem, I'll walk over
there because she's right there, and he's right there, because
we're on a thousand yard span, right.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Right, right, and there's just less complexity in a part
three situation. Right, you know you can avoid out of bounds,
you can, you know you can build. The course needs
to be built in design from the ground up, with
every thought in mind as to how do we develop children.
So in the Golf by Kids model, you have three
nine holes, and on those three nine holes, you can
(27:35):
put five players per hole, so that's five times twenty seven,
one hundred and thirty five. So you can put one
hundred and thirty five players out at seven am. Those
players should be able to finish with a six shot
maximum in other words, double part if you've touched the
ball five times again Dan van Horn's invention, you know,
(27:56):
ten shot maximum in his tournaments. With six shot maxim
you should be able to finish in there well under
two hours. And if you finish in under two hours,
the next group can go on at nine o'clock. And
so what this means, Rich is you have one hundred
and thirty five players with one hundred and thirty five
caddies populating a nine hole or a twenty seven whole
(28:20):
part three course at seven am. As those two seventy
finish and they start walking to what I termed the
awards plaza, the next two seventy you're walking on. So
this has nothing to do with golf. It has everything
to do with community engagement, with five hundred and forty
people colliding into each other, saying hi and happy birthday
(28:41):
and everything else people say when they see or nice
to meet you, or you know what did you shoot?
Whatever the conversation is you put. You created a positive,
healthy situation where people are walking. Now, there's going to
be some handicapped issues. I know, I'm not I always
want to remember there are people with handicaps that will
(29:02):
be involved too, and we'll sort that out. But just generally,
most people are going to be walking and they're running
into each other. The group that finishes it or goes
on at nine, they'll be finishing at around ten thirty. Again,
that crossover five hundred and forty people occurs different people, right,
and that happens five times during the day, so you
(29:23):
get a tremendous amount of community engagement where people are
meeting people and getting to know each other. One of
my systems is that every hole would have like a
miniature lifeguard chair on it, and that would be the
Pace of Play official, which would be one child assigned
to each of the holes, so twenty seven children, and
(29:46):
they would be the pace of play, meaning they would
make sure that everybody tease off when they're ready, that
they're organized, and they would also be the hole in
one person. But the protocol would be as the five
and five caddies walk onto the tee. Their job is
to go over there and shake hands and say hello
(30:07):
to the pace of play official. So if you have
nine holes and ten players per hole, that's ninety people.
So that one pace of play person kid is going
to get to shake hands with ninety people that day, right,
and so all twenty seven kids will shake hands with
ninety people that day. Now, what I'll tell you is
(30:29):
this math is beyond the capability. If anybody in the
PGA or the USGA, they can't count plus it past
three dollars. They just it's not it's not in their DNA.
They just don't look at these things. I look at
ways to create contacts with people so that they get
to know each other and meet each other and become friends.
(30:50):
Because if you do that, you do the opposite of
what's being what we're seeing in our in our country,
where we have people dhumanizing other people, which is resulting
in terrible outcomes. Yeah, you can't humanize them when you
get to know them.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, it's it's funny because I have a friend of
mine in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and he and I were talking
and we used to I started the largest high school
tournament in the state of Pennsylvania and I'm trying to
move it to my facility now. And it's actually the
first one. The first rendition of it or edition of
it was for his aunt. It was an anti drug
(31:29):
and now I'm going to make it and you know,
to raise awareness of childhood teen suicide. And he said
to me, he said, you know he goes. That is
so important he goes because you know, I'm he's a
he's a a landowner who rents to college kids at
a at a college campus. And he was like, you know,
(31:52):
kids today don't know how to be friends with each other.
They don't know how to be friends. They don't know
how to interact, they don't know how to talk to
each other. And like what you're talking about, it is
like it's right up that alley. It's like it's like, yeah,
you know what, it's not really important what you shoot.
It's probably more important who you talk to.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Well, here's what I would suggest to you, and I'd
suggest to this to the entire golf industry. Anybody that's listening,
is get behind golf by kids. Let's before something instead
of against it something. I'm against suicide. Two of my
brothers when I was in my nineteen twenty one, two
of my brothers committed suicide. So I'm very familiar. It's
(32:34):
a disaster. It's just a disaster when that happens. So
the issue is, instead of talking about how to prevent it,
let's talk about something great that as a side effect,
prevents it. Right. And Elon Musk blurted out in the
White House, you know a couple of months ago that
(32:56):
one of the biggest risks our country faces is to
climb any fertility rates. We're down to one point six.
It's got to be one or two point one apparently
for our population to sustain itself. And Elon Musku, is
way smarter than I'm ever going to be, says that
this is a disaster, and so I kind of believe them, right.
And so one of the problems that children are having
(33:19):
today with social media is that they are isolating themselves
and then it's getting worse because I'm not so sure
on the girl's side, but I know on the boys side,
a lot of boys early on are getting into violent
video games. And I believe that violent video games are
the core core for the incredible sick violence that we're seeing.
(33:40):
The shootings, we're seeing And I'm going to say, as
an addendum to that that a lot of people are
going to immediately jump out of their chair and say,
what do you mean folent video games? Cause that why
is it every kid you know going and shooting up things?
And it's the same reason that not everybody that's gets
(34:00):
lung cancer. But the more you smoke and the longer
you smoke, or more likely you're going to get lung cancer.
And the same thing is true with violent video games.
And in my view, it's a combination of other factors
for nutrition, lack of sleep, broken family, etc. There's a
(34:22):
few others that figure into that. But when you take
all of those factors and meld them and multiply them,
that's where you're going to get these kids past two
standard deviations that go over the edge and just wreck havoc.
I mean, we're talking about havoc that's going to go
on for fifty one hundred years. One day is going
(34:43):
to create fifty or one hundred years. So what I
would say is golf by kids is the antidote, because
golf by kids gets kids out and particularly boys and
girls on the golf course. We can do boy and
girl tournaments. Right, you can have a two boys and
two girls in a foursome playing a tournament. And so
(35:06):
what he does it gets back to the old school
where boys and girls are out doing stuff together and
each other.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Right, all right, So what we're gonna do now is
we're going to take a break and we come back.
We are going to talk about but what we need
to do immediately to start to grow this this flow
of water is, so to speak. This is the Rich
Koonwall Golf Show. Welcome back to the Rich Komonwall Golf Show.
We are joined by Robert Brown, who is the founder
(35:36):
and brain trust and energy source for Golf by Kids,
and we're talking about running golf tournaments four kids by kids,
with kids growing solid citizens and people that can can
(35:57):
actually improve their surrounding and is the friend group and
all that fun stuff through the game of golf. So Robert,
tell me, tell me how. I guess we just start
and you just start, right, I mean, I know, I
know there's funding involved and there's ways to get all
that stuff, but it's really just a decision to do
it right.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Well, yes, I believe we have the greatest president golf
president in the history that you can, again not being political,
you can argue that he's the greater president. He's definitely
the greatest golf president ever. He owns eighteen golf resorts
around the world. If I could, through your platform, through
the people that are listening to this somehow, if I
could reach President Trump's administration, RFK Junior should be very
(36:43):
interested in golf by Kids because you cannot make children
healthy by just changing the color of fruit loops. Healthy
children need to be outdoors doing what they used to do,
playing games. And it's really important to understand this Golf
by Kids models that it is largely self directed and
doesn't require the whole adult bureaucracy to run it. Adult
(37:09):
bureaucracy comes with all kinds of problems today. For one,
if you're relying on volunteers, volunteers are disappearing because they
don't have time. They're busy with their own lives, trying
to make money to pay their mortgages, et cetera, or
their rent which is going up. And then on top
of that, we're seeing more conflict in sports when adults
(37:31):
are involved than anybody that's an adult tends to be
attacked by people that are maybe too intense so you
eliminate that whole bureaucracy and let it be self directed.
So once it's self directed, now and you've got these
kids outdoors doing stuff that in the old school way
that they used to do, that is going to have
(37:52):
a major impact on children's health. And so that's why
I believe this should be a nationwide effort to drive
golf by kids, so that every single kid in America
has a chance to do what my three kids did,
regardless of the amount of money they have. So if
I can use your platform to get get through to
(38:13):
the Trump administration, obviously, to me, the most of the
problems that we're seeing today with children have to do
with technology, says video games. It's obvious, right, It's obvious.
So a way to deal with this. The tech companies
(38:37):
are also extremely rich, and NA Video is over four
trillion I think in market cap. Larry Ellison's net worth
the other day went up in one day by one
hundred and ten dollars. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, these guys
a lot of conflict here in Hawaii where they have
so much money. You have to do when you get money,
(38:59):
you have to do something, and so what they're doing
is they're buying up Hawaiian properties. The acres. Michael Dell
just bought another five hundred acres here in Away, and
it's stressing people out here because they don't know what
else to do with their money. What I would say is,
why don't we put some of that money back into
helping some of the damage that these tech companies are
(39:21):
doing with their technology. And I'm not saying that they're
intentionally damaging our kids, like they're set out to destroy
each oldering, but that's the effect that everyone can agree on,
and so you need countermeasures, and I believe the only
effective countermeasure in the entire world right now is golf
by kids. And by the way, you can play golf
(39:42):
and baseball. You can play golf and football.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
And basketball, right basketball or pickleball or whatever.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, you do whatever you want, but right now, kids
don't most kids golf with If the Southern California PGA
is listening, I will remind them that the Brown family
spent over fifty thousand dollars just in entry fees to
Southern California PGA junior golf tournaments. So how many families
(40:14):
can afford that? And that's after tax there's no tax production,
so that's more like one hundred thousand dollars an income
when just to pay entry fees for Sunday California PGA.
So how many families can afford that? So you have
to devise a system where kids have access logistics assets,
and then it has to be it can't be one
hundred miles away. It has to be clothes, and it
(40:36):
has to be it has to be free as a
base case. Now, what I would say in Golf by Kids,
all kids are free. But when that adult shows up
in a Rolls Royce and gets out with their TXG
clubs for their child, somebody's going to go over and say,
you know, your kid's not really free, right right right,
You're going to get to chip in. And this is
(40:58):
a normal thing in private schools. The private schools need
four children as part of the community, and so they
go to the wealthier family and they say, hey, you know,
you got to you know, pointing up some extra money
so we can have the etiquids. I also believe that
companies are in their own self interest in the Golf
by Kids model. Golf by Kids produces the perfect platform
(41:21):
for companies to take and plug and play into their
companies to become good employees. First and foremost, and despite
what we saw in the writer cop first and foremost,
golf is involves what I believe to be the most
important word in the English language, which is integrity. To me,
(41:42):
integrity is above every other word that you could think of,
and golf is centered on that principle of integrity. The
way you and by the way you see this over
and over in junior golf tournament. I encourage anybody that
hasn't been to a junior golf tournament, look, why not
get a lawn chair and go watch and see what
(42:04):
you see. It's an amazing site to see these kids
going out and competing on the golf course and the
way they act and conduct themselves. So if companies like
Procter and Gamble or IBM or Exon Mobile would name
River Company in their own self interest, they should be
(42:25):
funding off by kids because it's a platform which delivers
to them employees that they can hire. And can I
dwell on this point a little bit? God, So I
believe our schools have failed, and I'll tell you why.
Is because if Elon Musk had a car factory and
(42:46):
the cars were spewing out of the assembly line into
the parking lot, and nobody ever bought one, the business
would fail. Right, So if Elon Musk cars were not
being sold, he would be trying to figure out what's
causing our cars from being sold. I need to move
the car so I can produce more cars to replace
(43:08):
the ones that got sold. Well, I believe that our
high schools are failing because nobody are buying the cars
they are producing. Kids come out of high school and
by and large, other than Kobe Bryant. Kobe Bryant had
a job offer with the Lakers. Why can't our high
schools produce Kobe Bryant's across all skill sets? And so
(43:35):
I think what's happened is our schools have gone into
some grass and low expectations. We need to elevate that
game so that the expectation is when a child graduates,
there'll be a table or a line of tables of
companies begging that child, please don't go to college. We
need you right now.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Right, We need you to come to work tomorrow, or
like you take a week off and then come the work.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah, don't go to college. We need we need the
skill set that that high school has produced in you,
so you can go to work tomorrow what we've developed.
And I went through this myself. Right, I'm lucky to
be where I am, But I went through this whole thing.
Oh go to college, what are you doing? I don't know.
I'm at a party. Hard though, And you know, I
(44:22):
wasted another several years in college and ended up really
not using much of what I was supposedly taught. It
just was delayed. And I look back on it now
and I would completely change the system that I went through.
And one of the things that I went through is
I never had golf available to me. Was I believe
(44:44):
that golf was a stupid game. I was a tennis player,
didn't believe in it. But now I believe golf is
the most important game ever created on the face of
the earth because of all the components and what it delivers,
especially to children.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, I see, there's no there's really no way you
can argue that. Then this is this is where this
is where I think my association, the PGA of America,
actually falls well short. Because our because our because our
our you know, our our mission statement is to grow
the game only to the point where we can make
sure that we have some money, you know, and and
(45:21):
I would and I and I've gone over this with
the Tri State Section PGA. You know, we we charge,
we charge. We have twenty twenty five junior programs in
the summer which are awesome, and there're seventy five dollars
an entry fee. You know, I've got, I've got, you know,
I don't know. I don't know the exact stats, but
let's say fifty kids, fifty kids or fifty families that
(45:41):
are paying for Timmy to play in ten of them. Well,
that's seven hundred and fifty dollars. That's a lot of money.
And how many kids are out there that that can't
do that?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
There's like a ton of golf by kids. If golf
by kids is a self sustaining place where kids can
play for free and the data rich the data that
will come out once you create a golf by Kids,
and I want to do the first one here in ConA, Hawaii.
We've got lots of land, empty land. We just need
to organize that, and we need to organize the fund.
(46:12):
We need the money in the land and then we're
good to go. But once it starts running, you're going
to start to see amazing data that comes out of it,
particularly around what input creates what output. And what I
mean by that is a kid that starts at six
or seven years old, and you've got three kids. One
(46:34):
kid plays once a week, and the next kid plays
twice a week or whatever, and the other kid plays
three times a week. And we can measure this by
the amount of range buckets they use. You get one
range bucket per day by swiping your card, a little
electronic card, and then every kid that goes in, they're
going to go in a tournament. They're going to report
(46:55):
their scores. So we're going to know different kids at
different you know, inputs of the level that they put in,
what is their outcome in terms of their improvement. And
what I would say is you're going to see a
direct correlation. So we'll be able to say to parents, hey,
it's up to you. Here's the data. Here's what it says.
(47:16):
If you come once a year, you're not going to
get good. But if you come twice or three times
a week, this is what's going to happen. The thing
is that most parents have never ever seen another kid
playing golf. They might see one at the range or something.
So what this is going to do is concentrate them.
So parents are going to be able to open their
(47:37):
eyes and say, Wow, I want my kid to be
like that kid.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Right, I got to tell you something. This fifty two
minutes flew by. So here's what's going to happen. I
have eight more shows to go to one hundred, so
we're going to do this before Thanksgiving. This you went
to this guy, I'm gonna call you back and we're
we're gonna pick this up right where we left off.
Is that okay with you?
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Absolutely, there's a lot to talk about.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Xactly exactly exactly okay, Robert Brown, Golf Bight, kids, Thank
you so much. And this is the Rich Kumwell Golf Show.
Welcome to the Rich Comwell Golf Show. This week, we
are going to spend all of our time together talking
about junior golf, and I am joined by Robert Brown.
Robert is the founder of Golf by Kids, and Robert
is probably actually not probably is the most passionate person
(00:25):
I have ever met about creating opportunities in junior golf
and growing the game of golf through junior golf. And
we are going to spend a considerable amount of time
talking about junior golf and how to grow junior golf
and probably touch on some of the things that are
wrong with junior golf. But first off, Robert, thank you
for joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Rich thank you. I appreciate it. It's a great opportunity
and whatever we can do to get what I believe
the goal should be is every kid in America competent
in junior golf while they're a child, so they can
carry that skill for life.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Well that is a that's a fascinating that's les let's
get let's all right, So let's start there. So how
did you get here? Because obviously you're not a kid,
I mean, obviously you're advocating Golf by Kids, and I
understand all that, but tell me how you got to
this level of passion.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Very simple. I was not invited into the game by
the golf establishment from a junior golf perspective. We found
it on our own, which is the normal pattern in golf.
Is not necessarily the establishment people doing things that get
kids into golf. It's parents who come into it by
(01:47):
their own journey. So what happened in my case was
that we bought golf clubs for our kids in December
for Christmas of two thousand and six, and we then
that day or the next day, we went to the
golf course and hit some balls or whatever, and then
the clubs went in the closet because we were playing baseball.
(02:11):
And then after baseball season comes summer, and over that
summer I decided more in the interests of saving the
money of a camp, because anybody that has children knows
that in summertime you're looking for camps to put your
kids in because there's no school. And so I was
looking for a way to avoid the cost, which is
(02:35):
usually about five hundred dollars a kid, and so I
created a golf camp. And the golf camp structure was
five days where the kids went to the restaurant, to
the putting green, to the driving range, and then we
went and played nine holes on a thousand yard part
three course, went home, went back in the afternoon to
the putting green, driving range, played another nine holes in
(02:55):
the afternoon, and then went to the restaurant again, but
this time for a float to end the day. So
when I set this program up, I was not sure
the kids were going to make it because they'd never
played golf before, and how in the hell are they
going to play golf eighteen holes a day for five
days straight. I wasn't sure I was going to be
(03:16):
able to make it. So lo and behold, they went
through the week and Saturday morning, at seven o'clock, they're
in my bedroom going, Dad, Dad, let's go. The course
is open, Let's go to the restaurant and hit balls.
And that was in August of two thousand and seven,
and then their first tournament. Basically after that, every day
(03:37):
when I picked them up from school, I would say,
what do you guys want to do? Oh, we want
to go play golf, dad. So we would go play
the nine hole course, which we could do because it
would take, you know, ninety minutes you know, one hundred
minutes an hour and a half less than two hours.
So if I picked them up at three point thirty,
we could be done with golf by five thirty before
(03:58):
you know, mom got home, right, And so every day
that became our routine. And I was fascinated that they
started to become pretty good players pretty quickly. And so
they played their first tournament in December two thousand and seven,
and it went on from there that they played all
(04:20):
the way through college. They won. All three of my
children have gone on to college golf programs. My daughter
is now an NCAA champion from George Fox. So along
the way, I've seen it all, and the whole junior
golf system is messed up. It has some shining stars
(04:44):
in it. Most of it is because of individuals like
me that have gone and started things, you know, individual
junior golf programs. Most of the great things in golf
and junior golf haven't been started by the establ They
were grassroots efforts started by individuals who didn't have any
(05:05):
things available for their kids. So they'd said, well, look,
why don't we start a little tournament somewhere and have
a few kids play and that's kind of the story
of golf by kids. How it got started was because
my children were trying to gain entry that they deserved
because they were good players, into the Junior World in
(05:27):
San Diego. But unfortunately the qualifying for the Junior World
is now gotten to the point where it's a torture test.
I can show you an example. I'll send you the
link after if you want to see it. But there
was a twelve year old boy that went out and
shot five hunder par for eighteen holes in a qualifier
(05:47):
and didn't qualify for Junior World. Oh my god, that's
a stunning thing. That should that should shake anybody that's
involved in golf getting paid in the golf industry. That
stat should shape them to the core that they set
up a system of qualifying. We're a twelve year old
(06:07):
boy shot five hunder par and did not succeed.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
That's unbelievable. That's that's that's that's that's scary. That's scary.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Tell you that in the in the qualifying. So I'll
stay on that topic for a second. In qualifying, there
was I can send you another link where my two
sons went to qualify some golf course for Junior World.
There were five spots, and I think there were sixty
or seventy kids, sixty or seventy boys, and my sons
(06:42):
took two of the five spots, and I was broken
hearted because I knew that the reason that my kids
succeeded over the others largely was because we're wealthy and
we can afford more range baels, We can afford better equipment,
we can have aford more lessons, we can afford more tournaments.
(07:03):
So we won just because of our wealth. And these
other kids, great kids, working hard, but maybe their families
didn't have as much wealth, and so they got kicked
to the curb and the Brown family. Out of those
sixty or seventy spots, we took two of them, and
I was broken hard about it. I don't like that.
(07:24):
I like it to me. To me, golf ought to
be more judged on a standard that stays the same
and encourage more and more kids to get over that standard.
So let's just call it the four minute mile. If
you can run a four minute mile, you're freaking awesome.
We don't care that the world record for the mile
(07:46):
is now below three fifty. We're not going to worry
about that. What we're going to worry about is any
kid that can run the four minute mile. And I
wouldn't even say in golf the standard needs to be
that difficult. And what I would argue Rich is that
the golf industry, the elites, are perverted today. They are
(08:07):
perverted in the pursuit of taking one more stroke off
the score of some junior golfer who has now had
to give up everything else in their life simply to
pursue that one last stroke. The USGA has a national
development program. They're spending now over six million dollars a year.
(08:31):
It's growing every year. They are out vacuuming up money
from companies, know their sponsors. They're basically doing what Amazon
is doing to the small businesses. They're just using their
resources to suck up every junior golf dollar there might be,
(08:52):
and they're now spending it on what they call a
national development program. And you can read the literature on itself.
Of the coaches has stated the goal is that they
want their National Development Team member to win the gold
medal in golf.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
MH.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
But you know we already have Scottie Shuffler. Okay, we
already have We do you know, Xander, I don't know
why you would worry about that when we have kids
going into schools and shooting blindly and killing children, or
any other number of examples. We have kids struggling in
this country, desperately, desperately, and the USGA is focused on
(09:37):
shaving half a stroke or quarterstroke off of some kid
so they can win the Olympics in four years. Yeah,
it's perverted. It really is perverted. They are so insulated
in upon themselves they have no clue they There are
just so many areas I could breach. One of them
(09:59):
is discrimination against girls, and you would go, You would
ask yourself, how is it that in twenty twenty five
the golf industry would be knowingly discriminating against girls, even
to the point that Robert Brown points it out to
them and how wrong it is, and they ignore me,
(10:21):
to ignore any they just go on their mission. Well,
anybody can go and look at the US Junior Amateur
for twenty twenty five, and the US boys field was
about two hundred and sixty players and the girls field
was about one hundred and fifty players. I could get.
I already sent you the exact aid on that. So
(10:43):
you have that in your hands. But there's about one
hundred spot difference between the girls Junior Amateur and the
boys Junior Amateur, which is played separately, separate times. Why
are they discriminating and holding back girls that way? Wow?
This is perverted?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah, this is this is interesting stuff. So let me
ask you this. Okay, So let me go back to
to one. Let me go one step backwards. Okay. So
my my thing with with kids is is is that
is that you know, there's a lot worse places for
kids to be than a golf course. And and my
(11:26):
thing is is, yeah, it would be great. I mean,
I've been fortunate enough to teach some young people that
went on to do some pretty good stuff. But the
fact of the matter is there are a lot of
kids walking around that that can say they learned how
to play or to enjoy. I guess I should say,
you know, from a program like mine. So I guess
(11:50):
maybe what I would say is what you're what you're
actually advocating. And I understand all the math, and I
get all that what you're really advocating is to actually
you whose golf as a way to improve society and
young society in the United States.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
If I was President Trump, I'd sign an executive order
tomorrow and encourage Congress to pass the law to make
golf a national service program. The kids would get involved in,
just like math or anything else. And all you have
to do is go to any junior golf tournament and
look at the kids and the way they dress and
the way they shake hands and take their hats off
(12:31):
after the round. What you saw at the Ryder Cup
was another example of the failure of the leadership in golf.
They egged that whole situation on no doubt and no
doubt destroying. They're destroying everything you see in junior golf.
It's like, as a parent, your heartbursts and you go,
(12:51):
this is exactly what I'm as a parenting tool. This
is exactly the way I want my kid to grow up.
And yet I've watched TV and I see that it's
ridiculous and the PGA has no one other than themselves
to blame for that.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Oh I agree with I'm a PGA. I'm a PGA member,
And I emailed Don Ray and told him that that
was embarrassing by the President blocked me.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Let me talk to you about Don Ray for a second.
I had a conversation with Don Ray. He eventually blocked
me on LinkedIn. I have one question for you, Don Ray,
and I'll do it publicly and I've asked him privately.
But my one question for Don Ray is, when you
sought the presidency of the PGA, what was your one
signature goal that you had in mind that you would
(13:40):
achieve during your term? What big thing were you going
to do to be remembered for Don has never answered
that question to me. If you're going to seek the
presidency of an organization as large as the PGA, you
should have some firmly set out goals to It's like,
(14:00):
and I don't mean to get political. I know there's
people on both sides. Yeah, the President Trump laid out
some purely defined goals that he had in mind, and
that's what he told the people that he was running upon.
I like that. I like to know why somebody is
running for something, what they're going to do. And Don Ray,
despite I can send the emails where I've asked him
(14:20):
that and he's never answered. And he finally blocked me
on LinkedIn. I talked to Don about golf by kids
and the PGA right now has what would be you know,
they would call it a golden opportunity. I would say
there's probably some metal way more valuable than gold, right,
(14:43):
And that's the opportunity'd been given by President Trump's election.
They have the biggest golf president in the history of
the universe. And that's an opportunity that would be like
if you if you know, Rockefeller was a the president,
and you wanted to talk about oil, the oil industry,
(15:06):
you know, or something.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I say, Tom Brady becomes president, you want to about football?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah, time, Yeah, you'd have a pure thing. You'd have
a natural fit for football if Tom Brady became president.
Perfect example. So they had this opportunity, and what do
they spend their their collateral on. They spend it on
trying to kill live golf.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
And if I can talk about live golf for a second,
they we're off junior golf. But it's related because the
PGA and the USGA and that sort of thing. I
started an initiative him even talk to you about called
Veritas World Junior and Veritas was designed to become the
world's largest annual international junior golf championship, with ten thousand
(15:51):
junior golfers from one hundred and fifty countries, five thousand boys,
five thousand girls, five thousand US and five thousand international.
The model was opening ceremonies in front of a Major
League Baseball game, where one of the kids in the
tournament would be randomly selected to throw out the first pitch.
We had a dugout kid randomly selected, and we had
(16:14):
a playball announcer that was randomly selected, so we had
some you know, fun things. I set up contracts with
the Dodgers and Angels, so we ran it for four years.
The first year was at Dodger Stadium and the following
three years were at Angel Stadium. The end of the
event was designed to go to Disneyland, where I would
(16:34):
have bought out Disneyland from Friday night for a private party.
You know, they do these high school nights at Disneyland.
So it was on that same kind of model, and
I got no support from the golf industry. I only
asked them for two things. I asked them for help
with rules officials, and I asked them for publicity because
(16:58):
they have the channels to right put things out worldwide.
My ultimate dream would have been for Jim Nants to
announce during the Master's coverage. Hey kids, Hey moms and dads.
They've got this big tournament in Los Angeles coming up
this summer. Check it out. Find a qualifying plus. And
(17:19):
I can tell you that I applied back to the
future technology to this tournament to make it the best
thing ever in terms of every dimension. One of the
key components was that I empowered local junior golf organizations
around the world by giving them for free the exemption
(17:43):
papers to get into the tournament, which were all by
serial number, so I could tell you exactly how each
child that came into the tournament qualified by looking up
that serial number. But what you're doing is you're offering
this big international event to the kids in your local community.
Now that worked for me because now I get to
(18:03):
spread the word and they're running qualifiers and spreading the brand,
and the PGA was completely disinterested. And what I would
argue with these guys is you guys are functionally a
monopoly or an oligopoly, or whatever you want to call it.
You control everything. You control media, you control the golf courses,
(18:25):
you control the big tournaments, you control access. They control
it all. And when you have that kind of control,
you have an obligation to go out and help people
that are you know.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
In that is that need help, that needs help. All right,
so here's what we're going to do. We're going to
take a break right now, and then when we come back,
we're going to keep talking about how we're going to
how we're going to use golf to to kind of
like improve well, actually we're going to to seep golf
into everybody's childhood. This is the Rich Coombwell Golf Show. Well,
(19:00):
welcome back to the Rich Combo Golf Show. I'm actually very,
very very excited this week because I am speaking with
Robert Brown, who is the founder of Golf by Kids,
but is extremely passionate about growing junior golf and growing
the game of golf. Were actually just growing junior golf,
(19:20):
then by extension golf would grow too. So what we
started to talk about was a lot of different things.
But Robert, I want to know, like how you see
you know, your beginning your beginning statement was, you know,
to make you know, golf part of every child, make
(19:43):
every junior competent in the game of golf, and what
we can argue over competency, you know, break one hundred
and break ninety, break eighty, break fifty. I don't know,
but but so how do we.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Do that well? Break well? Competency is a great question,
And what I would argue from my standpoint is that
competency could be judged where a child can shoot even
par on a thousand yard part three course.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Perfect.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Now, most golf people, most people that involved in junior golf,
would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wha, that's too hard. That's ridiculous.
Shooting even par even for nine holes, that's that's just
way too hard. Well, I can tell you all three
of my children who shot five under for nine holes. Right,
that's hard, that's hard. But on a par three course
(20:37):
where you have a you know, a shorter iron into
each hold, and you can do that. It takes some work,
it takes some practice, but that's doable. But I would relent.
I would go, Okay, if you want to argue that,
let's make it thirty, let's make it three over par
or something. Right, And to me, when a kid the
golf industry should be set up so that when a
(20:59):
kid hits a competency goal, the golf industry should set
off some firework somewhere. But they don't they ignore all
those kids that are doing great things. The kid that
shot five under and didn't qualify for the Junior World
there was never any mention of that anywhere. He was just,
you know, to use Tiger's analogy, sec first loser. You know,
(21:23):
he was a loser in their world. So the way
you do it is the golf industry talks endlessly about
grow the.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
Game, to grow golf mission statement.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
And they now are something I'm gonna, I'm gonna we'll
make a little joke, care to make to lighten the
mood a little bit? Uh My joke is what is
the And I'll ask you this, what is the largest
healthcare claim for the PGA and U s GA people.
You know, No, it's rotator cuff surgery. And you go, well,
(22:04):
why would that be Well, because they packed themselves on
the back with both arms twenty four hours a day
and they wear out their rotator cuff.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
That's awesome, that's awesome. That's funny, that's funny.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
So it's true. I mean I was at the Junior
Golf dinner, you know, the awards dinner at the end
of season Southern California PGA, and the first thing they
did at the Junior Golf thing was start handing out
awards to each other, you know, all the managers, and
it was like who nominated who and who voted for who?
Nobody knew, right, we're just giving these awards to ourselves.
(22:39):
And you know, I want to say something loud and
clear too. This should be, this should resonate. Okay, this
should be, in my view, the biggest message of your day.
This is the most achievable biggest message of your day,
and that is that Dan van Horne should immediately be
installed in the World Golf Hall of Fame because Dan
(23:01):
van Horn has done more for golf in the past
and going on in the future than any other person
in the history of golf. Dan van Horn was not
given opportunities to play in Masters where he happened to
be the winner, like Jack Nicholas Arnold Palmer, who are
great people. Dan van Horn built something himself, and he
(23:24):
built it swimming upstream against the powers that probably didn't
want him to be successful, and he pursued it. He
now runs the biggest junior golf system in the world.
And I will thank Dan. I've thanked him many times
every time I chant get a chance I thank him.
But my daughter, who has issues that would keep her
(23:48):
out of golf, is only playing golf today and it's
an NCAA champion only because Dan van Horn believes that
parents should have the opportunity to go out and caddy
for their child, whereas most of the other industry believes
the child should just learn by themselves somehow. And so
(24:08):
I thank Dan van Horn. Dan van Horn, there should
be a movement somewhere to get him put in the
Hall of Fame, because there's a lot of people in
that Hall of Fame that nobody has ever heard of
and who have done practically nothing for golf, whereas Dan.
If you want to talk about grow the game, if
you removed everything that Dan did in golf and took
(24:29):
it away today, it would be a very interesting analysis
where golf would be today without Dan van Horn and
what he did individually. He built the whole thing from
the ground up, the whole system. I can't say enough
about Dan van Horn.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
He did.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
So you wanted to, I'm sorry, how do we do it?
So you wanted to talk about golf by kids. So
if you say you want to grow the game, and
if you're logical and you believe that the way to
grow the game is through kids, because teaching fifty year
(25:12):
olds how to play golf is not a very effective
way to grow your game. So you have kids that
you want to grow the game with. There is only
one rational answer that anybody could come to, and that
is that you have to take on building the courses
(25:33):
for the kids to play. And if you're going to
do that, you want to put in a system whereby
the kids can compete in a regular, rational way. And
that's what golf by kids is. Golf by kids is
called golf by kids because the kids play tournaments that
they run themselves. They are actually in charge. They do everything,
(25:59):
and it takes you know, if you start from day one.
Of course, you can't just open a course and tell
the kids to go run a tournament. It's probably not
going to run that well. But if you if you
present the proper technology to support them, and you you
work your way into it, and you have kids mentor
(26:22):
kids in other words, you need Once you know your job,
you have to teach two more kids. Right what your
job is? Whatever that if it's the rules official, then
you have to teach two other children how to be
a rules official. So on a part three course, obviously,
a rules official is a lot easier than it would
be at the Ryder Cup.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
It's sixty yeah, it's sixty six hundred yards, or sixty
two hundred yards is seventy four hundred yards, right, it's
a lot easier. It's a lot easier when you can
walk fifty feet and get the next hole.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
No, no, no, no, Golf by Kids it's part three.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
No, I know that, I know one. No, I know that.
So what I'm saying, I'm agreeing with you. So so
obviously I can.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
I can.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
I can rules official nine par phraise pretty much by
myself because I just walk Timmy's got a problem, I'll
walk over there. Janey's got a problem, I'll walk over
there because she's right there, and he's right there, because
we're on a thousand yard span, right.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Right, right, and there's just less complexity in a part
three situation. Right, you know you can avoid out of bounds,
you can, you know you can build. The course needs
to be built in design from the ground up, with
every thought in mind as to how do we develop children.
So in the Golf by Kids model, you have three
nine holes, and on those three nine holes, you can
(27:35):
put five players per hole, so that's five times twenty seven,
one hundred and thirty five. So you can put one
hundred and thirty five players out at seven am. Those
players should be able to finish with a six shot
maximum in other words, double part if you've touched the
ball five times again Dan van Horn's invention, you know,
(27:56):
ten shot maximum in his tournaments. With six shot maxim
you should be able to finish in there well under
two hours. And if you finish in under two hours,
the next group can go on at nine o'clock. And
so what this means, Rich is you have one hundred
and thirty five players with one hundred and thirty five
caddies populating a nine hole or a twenty seven whole
(28:20):
part three course at seven am. As those two seventy
finish and they start walking to what I termed the
awards plaza, the next two seventy you're walking on. So
this has nothing to do with golf. It has everything
to do with community engagement, with five hundred and forty
people colliding into each other, saying hi and happy birthday
(28:41):
and everything else people say when they see or nice
to meet you, or you know what did you shoot?
Whatever the conversation is you put. You created a positive,
healthy situation where people are walking. Now, there's going to
be some handicapped issues. I know, I'm not I always
want to remember there are people with handicaps that will
(29:02):
be involved too, and we'll sort that out. But just generally,
most people are going to be walking and they're running
into each other. The group that finishes it or goes
on at nine, they'll be finishing at around ten thirty. Again,
that crossover five hundred and forty people occurs different people, right,
and that happens five times during the day, so you
(29:23):
get a tremendous amount of community engagement where people are
meeting people and getting to know each other. One of
my systems is that every hole would have like a
miniature lifeguard chair on it, and that would be the
Pace of Play official, which would be one child assigned
to each of the holes, so twenty seven children, and
(29:46):
they would be the pace of play, meaning they would
make sure that everybody tease off when they're ready, that
they're organized, and they would also be the hole in
one person. But the protocol would be as the five
and five caddies walk onto the tee. Their job is
to go over there and shake hands and say hello
(30:07):
to the pace of play official. So if you have
nine holes and ten players per hole, that's ninety people.
So that one pace of play person kid is going
to get to shake hands with ninety people that day, right,
and so all twenty seven kids will shake hands with
ninety people that day. Now, what I'll tell you is
(30:29):
this math is beyond the capability. If anybody in the
PGA or the USGA, they can't count plus it past
three dollars. They just it's not it's not in their DNA.
They just don't look at these things. I look at
ways to create contacts with people so that they get
to know each other and meet each other and become friends.
(30:50):
Because if you do that, you do the opposite of
what's being what we're seeing in our in our country,
where we have people dhumanizing other people, which is resulting
in terrible outcomes. Yeah, you can't humanize them when you
get to know them.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, it's it's funny because I have a friend of
mine in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and he and I were talking
and we used to I started the largest high school
tournament in the state of Pennsylvania and I'm trying to
move it to my facility now. And it's actually the
first one. The first rendition of it or edition of
it was for his aunt. It was an anti drug
(31:29):
and now I'm going to make it and you know,
to raise awareness of childhood teen suicide. And he said
to me, he said, you know he goes. That is
so important he goes because you know, I'm he's a
he's a a landowner who rents to college kids at
a at a college campus. And he was like, you know,
(31:52):
kids today don't know how to be friends with each other.
They don't know how to be friends. They don't know
how to interact, they don't know how to talk to
each other. And like what you're talking about, it is
like it's right up that alley. It's like it's like, yeah,
you know what, it's not really important what you shoot.
It's probably more important who you talk to.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Well, here's what I would suggest to you, and I'd
suggest to this to the entire golf industry. Anybody that's listening,
is get behind golf by kids. Let's before something instead
of against it something. I'm against suicide. Two of my
brothers when I was in my nineteen twenty one, two
of my brothers committed suicide. So I'm very familiar. It's
(32:34):
a disaster. It's just a disaster when that happens. So
the issue is, instead of talking about how to prevent it,
let's talk about something great that as a side effect,
prevents it. Right. And Elon Musk blurted out in the
White House, you know a couple of months ago that
(32:56):
one of the biggest risks our country faces is to
climb any fertility rates. We're down to one point six.
It's got to be one or two point one apparently
for our population to sustain itself. And Elon Musku, is
way smarter than I'm ever going to be, says that
this is a disaster, and so I kind of believe them, right.
And so one of the problems that children are having
(33:19):
today with social media is that they are isolating themselves
and then it's getting worse because I'm not so sure
on the girl's side, but I know on the boys side,
a lot of boys early on are getting into violent
video games. And I believe that violent video games are
the core core for the incredible sick violence that we're seeing.
(33:40):
The shootings, we're seeing And I'm going to say, as
an addendum to that that a lot of people are
going to immediately jump out of their chair and say,
what do you mean folent video games? Cause that why
is it every kid you know going and shooting up things?
And it's the same reason that not everybody that's gets
(34:00):
lung cancer. But the more you smoke and the longer
you smoke, or more likely you're going to get lung cancer.
And the same thing is true with violent video games.
And in my view, it's a combination of other factors
for nutrition, lack of sleep, broken family, etc. There's a
(34:22):
few others that figure into that. But when you take
all of those factors and meld them and multiply them,
that's where you're going to get these kids past two
standard deviations that go over the edge and just wreck havoc.
I mean, we're talking about havoc that's going to go
on for fifty one hundred years. One day is going
(34:43):
to create fifty or one hundred years. So what I
would say is golf by kids is the antidote, because
golf by kids gets kids out and particularly boys and
girls on the golf course. We can do boy and
girl tournaments. Right, you can have a two boys and
two girls in a foursome playing a tournament. And so
(35:06):
what he does it gets back to the old school
where boys and girls are out doing stuff together and
each other.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Right, all right, So what we're gonna do now is
we're going to take a break and we come back.
We are going to talk about but what we need
to do immediately to start to grow this this flow
of water is, so to speak. This is the Rich
Koonwall Golf Show. Welcome back to the Rich Komonwall Golf Show.
We are joined by Robert Brown, who is the founder
(35:36):
and brain trust and energy source for Golf by Kids,
and we're talking about running golf tournaments four kids by kids,
with kids growing solid citizens and people that can can
(35:57):
actually improve their surrounding and is the friend group and
all that fun stuff through the game of golf. So Robert,
tell me, tell me how. I guess we just start
and you just start, right, I mean, I know, I
know there's funding involved and there's ways to get all
that stuff, but it's really just a decision to do
it right.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Well, yes, I believe we have the greatest president golf
president in the history that you can, again not being political,
you can argue that he's the greater president. He's definitely
the greatest golf president ever. He owns eighteen golf resorts
around the world. If I could, through your platform, through
the people that are listening to this somehow, if I
could reach President Trump's administration, RFK Junior should be very
(36:43):
interested in golf by Kids because you cannot make children
healthy by just changing the color of fruit loops. Healthy
children need to be outdoors doing what they used to do,
playing games. And it's really important to understand this Golf
by Kids models that it is largely self directed and
doesn't require the whole adult bureaucracy to run it. Adult
(37:09):
bureaucracy comes with all kinds of problems today. For one,
if you're relying on volunteers, volunteers are disappearing because they
don't have time. They're busy with their own lives, trying
to make money to pay their mortgages, et cetera, or
their rent which is going up. And then on top
of that, we're seeing more conflict in sports when adults
(37:31):
are involved than anybody that's an adult tends to be
attacked by people that are maybe too intense so you
eliminate that whole bureaucracy and let it be self directed.
So once it's self directed, now and you've got these
kids outdoors doing stuff that in the old school way
that they used to do, that is going to have
(37:52):
a major impact on children's health. And so that's why
I believe this should be a nationwide effort to drive
golf by kids, so that every single kid in America
has a chance to do what my three kids did,
regardless of the amount of money they have. So if
I can use your platform to get get through to
(38:13):
the Trump administration, obviously, to me, the most of the
problems that we're seeing today with children have to do
with technology, says video games. It's obvious, right, It's obvious.
So a way to deal with this. The tech companies
(38:37):
are also extremely rich, and NA Video is over four
trillion I think in market cap. Larry Ellison's net worth
the other day went up in one day by one
hundred and ten dollars. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, these guys
a lot of conflict here in Hawaii where they have
so much money. You have to do when you get money,
(38:59):
you have to do something, and so what they're doing
is they're buying up Hawaiian properties. The acres. Michael Dell
just bought another five hundred acres here in Away, and
it's stressing people out here because they don't know what
else to do with their money. What I would say is,
why don't we put some of that money back into
helping some of the damage that these tech companies are
(39:21):
doing with their technology. And I'm not saying that they're
intentionally damaging our kids, like they're set out to destroy
each oldering, but that's the effect that everyone can agree on,
and so you need countermeasures, and I believe the only
effective countermeasure in the entire world right now is golf
by kids. And by the way, you can play golf
(39:42):
and baseball. You can play golf and football.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
And basketball, right basketball or pickleball or whatever.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, you do whatever you want, but right now, kids
don't most kids golf with If the Southern California PGA
is listening, I will remind them that the Brown family
spent over fifty thousand dollars just in entry fees to
Southern California PGA junior golf tournaments. So how many families
(40:14):
can afford that? And that's after tax there's no tax production,
so that's more like one hundred thousand dollars an income
when just to pay entry fees for Sunday California PGA.
So how many families can afford that? So you have
to devise a system where kids have access logistics assets,
and then it has to be it can't be one
hundred miles away. It has to be clothes, and it
(40:36):
has to be it has to be free as a
base case. Now, what I would say in Golf by Kids,
all kids are free. But when that adult shows up
in a Rolls Royce and gets out with their TXG
clubs for their child, somebody's going to go over and say,
you know, your kid's not really free, right right right,
You're going to get to chip in. And this is
(40:58):
a normal thing in private schools. The private schools need
four children as part of the community, and so they
go to the wealthier family and they say, hey, you know,
you got to you know, pointing up some extra money
so we can have the etiquids. I also believe that
companies are in their own self interest in the Golf
by Kids model. Golf by Kids produces the perfect platform
(41:21):
for companies to take and plug and play into their
companies to become good employees. First and foremost, and despite
what we saw in the writer cop first and foremost,
golf is involves what I believe to be the most
important word in the English language, which is integrity. To me,
(41:42):
integrity is above every other word that you could think of,
and golf is centered on that principle of integrity. The
way you and by the way you see this over
and over in junior golf tournament. I encourage anybody that
hasn't been to a junior golf tournament, look, why not
get a lawn chair and go watch and see what
(42:04):
you see. It's an amazing site to see these kids
going out and competing on the golf course and the
way they act and conduct themselves. So if companies like
Procter and Gamble or IBM or Exon Mobile would name
River Company in their own self interest, they should be
(42:25):
funding off by kids because it's a platform which delivers
to them employees that they can hire. And can I
dwell on this point a little bit? God, So I
believe our schools have failed, and I'll tell you why.
Is because if Elon Musk had a car factory and
(42:46):
the cars were spewing out of the assembly line into
the parking lot, and nobody ever bought one, the business
would fail. Right, So if Elon Musk cars were not
being sold, he would be trying to figure out what's
causing our cars from being sold. I need to move
the car so I can produce more cars to replace
(43:08):
the ones that got sold. Well, I believe that our
high schools are failing because nobody are buying the cars
they are producing. Kids come out of high school and
by and large, other than Kobe Bryant. Kobe Bryant had
a job offer with the Lakers. Why can't our high
schools produce Kobe Bryant's across all skill sets? And so
(43:35):
I think what's happened is our schools have gone into
some grass and low expectations. We need to elevate that
game so that the expectation is when a child graduates,
there'll be a table or a line of tables of
companies begging that child, please don't go to college. We
need you right now.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Right, We need you to come to work tomorrow, or
like you take a week off and then come the work.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah, don't go to college. We need we need the
skill set that that high school has produced in you,
so you can go to work tomorrow what we've developed.
And I went through this myself. Right, I'm lucky to
be where I am, But I went through this whole thing.
Oh go to college, what are you doing? I don't know.
I'm at a party. Hard though, And you know, I
(44:22):
wasted another several years in college and ended up really
not using much of what I was supposedly taught. It
just was delayed. And I look back on it now
and I would completely change the system that I went through.
And one of the things that I went through is
I never had golf available to me. Was I believe
(44:44):
that golf was a stupid game. I was a tennis player,
didn't believe in it. But now I believe golf is
the most important game ever created on the face of
the earth because of all the components and what it delivers,
especially to children.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, I see, there's no there's really no way you
can argue that. Then this is this is where this
is where I think my association, the PGA of America,
actually falls well short. Because our because our because our
our you know, our our mission statement is to grow
the game only to the point where we can make
sure that we have some money, you know, and and
(45:21):
I would and I and I've gone over this with
the Tri State Section PGA. You know, we we charge,
we charge. We have twenty twenty five junior programs in
the summer which are awesome, and there're seventy five dollars
an entry fee. You know, I've got, I've got, you know,
I don't know. I don't know the exact stats, but
let's say fifty kids, fifty kids or fifty families that
(45:41):
are paying for Timmy to play in ten of them. Well,
that's seven hundred and fifty dollars. That's a lot of money.
And how many kids are out there that that can't
do that?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
There's like a ton of golf by kids. If golf
by kids is a self sustaining place where kids can
play for free and the data rich the data that
will come out once you create a golf by Kids,
and I want to do the first one here in ConA, Hawaii.
We've got lots of land, empty land. We just need
to organize that, and we need to organize the fund.
(46:12):
We need the money in the land and then we're
good to go. But once it starts running, you're going
to start to see amazing data that comes out of it,
particularly around what input creates what output. And what I
mean by that is a kid that starts at six
or seven years old, and you've got three kids. One
(46:34):
kid plays once a week, and the next kid plays
twice a week or whatever, and the other kid plays
three times a week. And we can measure this by
the amount of range buckets they use. You get one
range bucket per day by swiping your card, a little
electronic card, and then every kid that goes in, they're
going to go in a tournament. They're going to report
(46:55):
their scores. So we're going to know different kids at
different you know, inputs of the level that they put in,
what is their outcome in terms of their improvement. And
what I would say is you're going to see a
direct correlation. So we'll be able to say to parents, hey,
it's up to you. Here's the data. Here's what it says.
(47:16):
If you come once a year, you're not going to
get good. But if you come twice or three times
a week, this is what's going to happen. The thing
is that most parents have never ever seen another kid
playing golf. They might see one at the range or something.
So what this is going to do is concentrate them.
So parents are going to be able to open their
(47:37):
eyes and say, Wow, I want my kid to be
like that kid.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Right, I got to tell you something. This fifty two
minutes flew by. So here's what's going to happen. I
have eight more shows to go to one hundred, so
we're going to do this before Thanksgiving. This you went
to this guy, I'm gonna call you back and we're
we're gonna pick this up right where we left off.
Is that okay with you?
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Absolutely, there's a lot to talk about.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Xactly exactly exactly okay, Robert Brown, Golf Bight, kids, Thank
you so much. And this is the Rich Kumwell Golf Show.
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.