The long distance run of advocacy pays off in ways small and large.

Every year I travel to Washington D.C. to participate in the American Golf Industry Coalition’s (AGIC) National Golf Day festivities — three days packed with meetings with Congressional Offices and Administrative Agencies. Upon returning this year, I was queried by an SCGA member about what the game gets out of these meetings and more specifically, why I go every year.

Those are reasonable questions given the fact that this column is typically focused on local, regional and state issues. So, let me try to answer both of them. My guess is that in those answers you will gain a better understanding of why golf does need to engage at the federal level.

The golf community’s marquee agenda priority for 2026 National Golf Day was support for H.R. 1583 (Parity for Athletic Recreation Act/ PAR Act; Tenney, Panetta, Hudson), a bill that would modernize the U.S. Tax Code so that golf would no longer be included in the so-called “Sin List” of businesses that are categorically excluded from receiving federal disaster relief provided by Congress on emergency bases.

▪ 144(c)(6)(B) of the Internal Revenue Code provides: “No portion of the proceeds of such issue is to be used to provide (including the provision of land for) any private or commercial golf course, country club, massage parlor, hot tub facility, suntan facility, racetrack or other facility used for gambling, or any store the principal business of which is the sale of alcoholic beverages for consumption off premises.”

This 1976 Internal Revenue Code provision excluded golf facilities from accessing disaster relief and economic stimuli routinely made available to other types of businesses after major disasters such as hurricanes, fires, floods and earthquakes.

The golf community first became aware of the “Sin List” in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina left damaged golf courses without access to emergency relief funding. Course owners in Louisiana expressed that had their businesses sold golf merchandise in a brickand-mortar store, financial assistance would have been available, but because the owners’ business provided the landscapes upon which the golf merchandise is utilized, the owners’ facilities were not eligible for financial assistance. This inequity became a rallying cry for a golf community that found it absurd to deny golf courses relief as if they were something that Mother Nature had done communities a favor by razing. Thus was born the first iteration of what has become today the American Golf Industry Coalition (AGIC).

The SCGA member then questioned whether I thought it had been wise for AGIC to commit so much effort to an issue that it had not been able to dent in 20 years of trying. When I answered with a resounding “Yes!” to his question, the member appeared perplexed.

Advocacy is a long-distance run occasionally punctuated by progress that only appears to have been a sprint, I explained to the questioning member. The simple fact that we now have a bill in print is “progress.” For some years all we had was a talking point.

Also indicative of progress is the fact that supplemental emergency relief funds appropriated recently DID NOT categorically exclude golf facilities (e.g., the Paycheck Protection Program/PPP and the Emergency Disaster Loan Program/EIDL, which were part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act/CARES Act). This took intentional action in which members of Congress who had spent years listening to golf’s “talking point” chose to include a wider swath of businesses and non-profits in federal relief packages.

Had it not been for golf’s ongoing advocacy work to educate decision-makers about the “Sin List,” the language would have been copied and pasted into hastily drafted emergency relief legislation and golf would have again been excluded.

The golf community will continue advocating for amendments to the Internal Revenue Code, because if the language remains intact, the “Sin List” will continue to be the default language incorporated in future supplemental emergency relief appropriations. The marathon run doesn’t stop because of a few successful sprints.

The National Golf Day agenda included topics of importance other than golf’s misplacement on an IRS “Sin List.” But the one item I want to share is about a long-distance run the SCGA has been running within AGIC.

For years I have been critical of our national partners in AGIC for crafting an agenda focused on the game’s lowest common denominator at the expense of regional issues of greater importance, like water. So, I was gratified to be invited to a meeting at the Department of the Interior with some key principals of the Bureau of Reclamation to kick off what AGIC envisages as the development of a regular dialog with the agency that oversees the Colorado River Basin and water-related flashpoints increasingly affecting the game in regions beyond the Southwest.

This long-distance run will yield palpable benefits to the game here in Southern California.

When asked by members what I do, my stock answer is that I operate at the myriad levels where the game and public policy intersect. Though distant and not always understood, the federal government is one of those levels.