Golf's Latest Innovation Takes a Page From... Snowboarding? - Wall Street Journal

June 5, 2015 5:54 p.m. ET

Bend, Ore.

If you believe Laird Hamiltonâ€"world-famous surfer and a co-founder of the company that invented GolfBoardsâ€"we will all be “surfing the earth” when we play golf sometime in the near future. “It’s for everybody,” Hamilton said. “You can’t deny the functionality of it, you can’t deny the fun of it, you can’t deny the athleticism of it. It just has too many things to offer to ignore.”

Last weekend, during the first GolfBoard Open at the Tetherow Resort here, there were times I thought Hamilton might be right. I’ve never snowboarded and barely downhill skied, but within five minutes of stepping onto a GolfBoard I felt entirely comfortable carving turns around the driving range. By the back nine of my first GolfBoard round, mounting the scooter-like contraption after each shot had become as natural as sliding into a golf cart seat or hoisting my golf bag over my shoulder.

I’m not convinced that GolfBoards will be as ubiquitous as motorized carts anytime soon. As exhilarating as they can be, golfboarding isn’t quite as social as walking down the fairway with a pal or as mindlessly relaxing as motoring along in a cart. But I can report this: One of the nation’s largest golf companies, Billy Casper Golf, announced this week that by the end of the year more than half of the 150 courses it manages will offer GolfBoard rounds.

“We just completed a five-month beta test at four courses and consumer reaction was significantly more positive than we anticipated,” said Peter Hill, the company’s chief executive. Golfers were excited about the boards and played faster when using them. “We think four players on four GolfBoards can complete an 18-hole round in three hours or less. That works as long as you don’t have slower golfers in front of you,” Hill said.

GolfBoards evolved from a friendship between Hamilton and Don Wildman, the 82-year-old founder of Bally’s Total Fitness. “We weren’t trying to save golf or anything, we were just looking for a way to make golf more fun for us,” said Hamilton, who has ridden big waves up to 70 feet tall and is credited with co-inventing tow-in surfing, which incorporates jet skis. The earliest boards had no handle and iffy, sometimes dangerous batteries. The first marketing scheme was “renegade golf,” in anticipation of the type of resistance snowboarders initially encountered from traditional skiers. Instead, Wildman said, “every course we went to was immediately interested.”

The current boardsâ€"designed to be rental-fleet durableâ€"have lithium ion batteries, 14-inch-wide platforms, four computer-controlled, lawn-mower-like wheels and a thumb-operated accelerator switch on the handle. They can be set to run slow (seven miles per hour on rental models) or fast (11 miles per hour) and brake automatically when you release the accelerator. The only other active control is forward and reverse. You steer by shifting your weight and/or foot position on the platform, or by yanking the handle from side to side. Figuring out the best combination of steering techniques for each situation can be a challenge. Golfers with snowboard or skateboard experience tend to stand sideways, hold the handle with one hand and mostly use weight shift. Newbies like me usually hold on with both hands.

Either way, it’s hard to fall off without really trying to. “Surfing the earth” down an open fairway is exhilarating. It’s impossible to resist throwing in a few gratuitous flourishes. The trickiest part of golfboarding is maneuvering in tight quarters at slow speed, such as around sharp turns on cart paths between holes.

Tetherow Resort, located not far from GolfBoard headquarters, has served as a kind of test bed. It has had a fleet of 30 GolfBoards, the largest anywhere, since last summer and has found that its members and daily fee players, of all ages and genders, choose to use them about 25% of the time. The first hour of tee times each day almost all go out on GolfBoards. “I never use carts anymore,” said Dave Swisher, 49, one of the club’s early-morning players. “It just adds another element to the game. Today I didn’t play very well but I still had fun. It kind of grounds me,” he said.

Mark Reinecke, another Tetherow regular, said he walks, takes a cart and uses a GolfBoard in about equal measure. “Using a cart is fun and there’s more room for beer,” he said. “The GolfBoard is a blast and if there aren’t a lot of people on the course you can play really fast because you can ride right up to the green.” GolfBoards can go where carts cannot because they usually don’t weigh much more than 300 pounds, with player and bag, compared to four to six times that weight for a fully-loaded cart. Also, GolfBoard wheels aren’t prone to turf-destroying spin-out in poor traction conditions.

GolfBoards aren’t a panacea and they won’t be an easy sell at every club. The private Awbrey Glen Golf Club in Bend, not far from Tetherow, is testing four GolfBoards. “Some of our members love them, but others find they are too distracting from their usual golf games,” said Tommy Berg, assistant pro at the club. As with any new product, there will be financial and logistical issues, such as where to store and charge GolfBoards and how to mix GolfBoards in with other forms of play. (GolfBoards retail for $6,500.) But if enough golfers take to GolfBoards, details like that won’t be too hard to iron out.

â€"Email John Paul at golfjournal@wsj.com