Golf's Answer to Pickleball Is Spreading Across the US

There’s a sport gaining ground in the United States that has numerous similarities to an already-popular sport here, but with slightly different gear and played with larger balls. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Yeah, we know about pickleball already,” well, it’s not pickleball. The sport is park golf, developed in Japan in the 1980s and beginning to make its presence felt globally.

One park golf course recently opened in the New York metropolitan area — specifically, at Great Gorge Golf Club in Vernon, New Jersey. The club in question has a long history (including an early connection to the Playboy Club) and currently touts the presence of a Tom Fazio-designed course on the premises. As NJ.com’s Rob Jennings reports, though, that’s no longer the only game in town.

Jennings recounted his own experience playing at Great Gorge, which is one of a handful of park golf courses currently operational in the United States. To play the game, Jennings wrote, he used “a single, shorter club that resembles a modified croquet mallet.” The size of both the club and the balls used in the sport keeps them relatively low when hit; all told, Jennings finished an 18-hole game in around an hour.

Park golf, created in 1983 by Atsushi Maehara, is a big deal in Japan; according to the International Park Golf Association of America, there are 1,300 courses to be found across the country. Things are moving more slowly here. With Great Gorge’s course now open, it joins another facility in the northeast — Destroyer Park Golf Course, which was the first of its kind to open in the U.S. in 2013.

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In a 2017 article for Golf Course Architecture, Quinn Thompson offered more insights into the sport, noting its appeal to young and old players alike. “[T]here was a lingering difference that came after each swing on a park course: I was having fun,” Thompson wrote. “There were no ten-minute searches for a five-dollar ball, no petty rules to look up in a book.”

It’s not hard to see the appeal here, for both experienced golf players and newcomers who might find spending a day on the green more of a chore than they’d like.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…