AMERICA'S CHEAPEST GOLF STORE DESTROYED BY ONE BAD IDEA: LAS VEGAS DISCOUNT GOLF

AMERICA'S CHEAPEST GOLF STORE DESTROYED BY ONE BAD IDEA: LAS VEGAS DISCOUNT GOLF
In nineteen seventy-four, a nightclub owner from San Francisco opened a golf shop on a corner in Las Vegas. He was not a club maker. He was not a touring professional. He had spent the previous fifteen years booking comedians and bands into rooms that stayed open until dawn. He knew exactly one thing about the golf business. It happened to be the one thing the golf business had agreed nobody was supposed to say out loud. The good clubs cost too much."

Vaso Boreta broke the one rule American golf retail was built on. He sold pro-line equipment at a discount, took out a small ad in Golf Digest offering a mail-order catalog that did not exist yet, and turned a single store beside the Las Vegas airport into 43 franchised locations across 17 states and two countries.

Then he leased 65 acres on the Strip.

What follows is one of the strangest collapses in golf retail history, and it is all sitting in the company's own SEC filings. To fund a theme park, they sold the franchise network, the wholesale operation and three of four stores — and signed a non-compete agreeing to stay out of the golf equipment business entirely. Eighteen months later they sold their stake in the one thing that was actually making money, a driving range built with Callaway Golf, to finish the construction. The park lasted less than three years. The landlord kept everything on the site. And the $5,000,000 of preferred stock Sanyo's affiliate had bought in 1996 was repurchased in 2001 for $5,000.

The retail business never failed. It was spent.

By 2010 the company had one asset left: a driving range carrying a rival's name. By 2021 it had no golf in it at all.

If you ever ordered clubs out of a Las Vegas Discount Golf catalog, tell me in the comments what you ordered and roughly what year it turned up. These stories only exist because people remember buying the things.

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Las Vegas Discount Golf, Las Vegas Discount Golf and Tennis, Vaso Boreta, Voss Boreta, Ronald Boreta, All-American SportPark, Saint Andrews Golf Corporation, Global Acquisitions Corporation, Callaway Golf Center, Divine Nine, golf mail order catalog, discount golf equipment, golf retail history, golf business documentary, failed golf companies, Las Vegas golf history, Andre Agassi investment, Sanyo Three Oceans, Topgolf before Topgolf, golf brand collapse, rise and fall golf, Nevada Bob's, golf equipment industry, driving range business, persimmon archive

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**SOURCES**
All-American SportPark, Inc. Form 10-K, FY2010 — SEC EDGAR, CIK 0000930245
All-American SportPark, Inc. Forms 10-K, FY2012, FY2013, FY2015, FY2017, FY2020 — same CIK
Saint Andrews Golf Corporation SB-2 registration statement, file no. 33-84024
Voss Boreta obituary — Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 2013
Las Vegas Golf Hall of Fame — Voss Boreta profile
Golf Las Vegas Now — "Las Vegas Golf Retail Icon Voss Boreta Passes Away," October 2013
Las Vegas Review-Journal — "Las Vegas Golf and Tennis changes ownership," June 2019

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