Yes, there is an upside. Golf on its bad days is a musty closet full of stale odors. Not everybody new to golf these days is a troglodyte. The right kinds of new ideas are at once welcome and overdue. Tiger and Nike and the Fox Network and all the other arriviste are opening doors.
Fresh air can be a good thing.
Years and years ago a sportswriter named Leonard Koppett showed up in a New York baseball press box carrying a briefcase. This was new. A sportswriter with a briefcase. Koppett was something of a statistical maven, more interested in numbers and percentages than the human side of the athletes he covered. Baseball players then were just starting to receive the kind of attention that would, today, be grist for Hard Copy's sordid mill.