By Jim Nugent
I first met Martin Slumbers in 2015, at the Walker Cup at Royal Lytham & St Annes in England. He wasn’t quite in the chair at the time, but he had been announced as the successor to Peter Dawson as CEO of the R&A. On Saturday afternoon, after the singles matches had teed off, we met for coffee. I recall thinking, as we parted ways, that he was a man of great confidence, and that he was going to make an impact. He was not then, nor now, without opinion – indeed, convictions.
Slumbers was an outsider at the time, having spent most of his adult life in the global banking industry. But he was a keen golfer – I learned that one of our mutual golf heroes was Seve Ballesteros – and it was clear that he was passionate about the game.
Slumbers, 64, who plays off a 2 index, just as he did when he began his term in office, winds down his nine-year run this month. We spoke about that tenure in mid-November.
Global Golf Post: What are the accomplishments you are most proud of over the past decade?
Martin Slumbers: There is a lot of stuff that has happened that I am really pleased with, but I think there are three developments that have framed my time here. First is the impact we have had on the women’s and girls’ golf, at all levels, from grassroots programs to championship golf. We started the Women’s Amateur Asia-Pacific [in 2018], the Women’s Amateur Latin America [in 2021] and the Africa Amateur Women’s Invitational [in 2024]. There are a number of reasons why the game is growing, and I think our investment in the women’s game is one of them.
But it’s not just playing golf. We spent a lot of time talking about how we get more women working in the industry. We started the R&A [Foundation] Scholarship Program, a mini-MBA within the R&A. We are on cohort No. 10 at the moment, and it is open to applicants from around the world. We have a large number of next-generation leaders who have come through this program.
Linked to this was my desire to have the R&A be more proactive in driving participation. We helped before I got here, but we basically wrote checks. I felt we needed to be much more decisive. We have doubled the amount of money we have put into the game, more than £200 million [about $250 million-plus] over a decade. In the R&A’s jurisdiction, we now have 62.3 million people consuming golf, up 10 million since 2018.
The third thing is our professional championships. I wanted to take the Open Championship from being a great tournament to being one of the world’s great sporting events. Big-time sport needs big-time crowds. We have grown the Open. We clarified the brand of the Open and commercialized it a lot more. It is our engine to invest funds into the game. It’s closer to being a world-class event than when I got here.
Linked to that is the Women’s Open. We took it on after the merger with the Ladies’ Golf Union in 2016, and up to that point it had been run very tightly. With our additional funding and with the help of AIG, I think we have turned it into one of the great sporting events in the world for women.
GGP: Do you have any unfinished business?
MS: Not really. I had a list of things I wanted to do in my tenure, and I ticked most of them off by the end of last year. My only regret is that the men’s professional game remains divided. As someone who spent 10 years trying to promote the game, that is a letdown.
GGP: When it comes to purses, how high is up? You have been very active in raising purses, but this could be having a negative impact on the fan base. How long can this arms race continue before the purses hit a ceiling?
MS: I think we have hit the ceiling. We need stability in the men’s game. I don’t mind what the outcome is; I don’t mind if there is more than one tour. We had that before, and it worked extremely well. But we need stability.
As a part of this, we need to have a discussion about long-term financial stability. I am concerned about this because if there is not stability and sustainability, the game might not exist down the line. I think we have pushed the limits. There is no doubt in my mind that the division and the constant talk about money has done damage to the perception of the game. I would hope that as a part of an outcome that there would be less conversation about money by all of us. Not just the tours and administrators, but by the media as well. It drives me nuts when I watch TV and all I hear about is money. The general public doesn’t watch golf to see dollar signs; it watches golf to see the best players playing golf, preferably on the best golf courses. We need to get back to talking about values, about history, about great venues and not about money. The best businesses in the world are about product, not about the money. The money just happens.
GGP: Golf It!, the fabulous new golf entertainment facility you led the development of in Glasgow: is that a one-off, or is it scalable?
MS: At the moment, it’s a one-off. At the beginning, if we truly believe in growing the game, we needed a physical manifestation of what that looked like. Golf It! is that. I also thought golf was a game of the people and it was part of the community. It’s where you went for your life. Along the way, we lost that and got to a point where there was more wrought-iron gate than community spirit. Golf It! was designed to be in an area where it is for the people whether they play golf or not. It is doing incredibly well. Is the idea scalable? Yes. We have been talking to different people about programs and structures. I will be very interested to see how this plays out over the next five to 10 years.
GGP: On the regulatory front, as it relates to distance in the game, are you satisfied with where things stand?
MS: Yes, I am. When I came to this role, one of the things that I had thought about quite carefully is that golf is a game where there should be a balance between skill and technology. There is no doubt that technology has been a massive reason why the game has become more popular. It has made the game a lot easier to play, certainly compared to when I was growing up. The driver is now the easiest club to hit instead of the hardest club to hit. Technology has been fantastic. But as you go up the skill level, is technology overriding the ability of certain skills to emerge for the top players?
Then I thought about the need for our sport to become far more environmentally sustainable. There are going to be ever-increasing constraints on our ability to use property. You can easily imagine a future in some countries where governments get involved and say, ‘No, you can’t build there, and you can’t put water on it.’
So, I always believed we needed to do something about the golf ball, something about driving distance. We were aware that we had not done anything [about regulation] in 20 years, so we had to focus on process, and we had to collaborate an awful lot and get a lot of people’s views. One of the things I found interesting is that many commentators thought collaboration means that everyone has to agree. That’s not what collaboration is. Collaboration is about asking for lots of inputs and then somebody making a decision. The R&A and the USGA have made a decision about the golf ball. The Rules of Golf change in January 2028, and the priority right now is working with the industry to figure out what is the easiest way and most effective way to make that transition.
The other piece of this is that we have set the scene for continued dialogue around technology and equipment rules. I don’t think the golf ball is the last change that will happen in the decades to come. I think the efforts of the last eight years have created an environment where this conversation can take place a little easier than before.