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Every few months, a non-golf media property will publish an article that throws shade on the game - its costs, its history of exclusivity, its environmental impact.
If you had Option C as the subject of the latest piece to get golfers riled up, you win. Last week, The Daily Beast's Nick Aspinwall published a piece called "Why Golf Might Not Survive the 21st Century." But as dire and click-baity as the headline sounds, the article is well worth a read. Rather than ripping the game and the industry entirely, it raises important questions about golf's place in a potential future when increasing land and water scarcity forces certain tough decisions to be made about green spaces.
"Modern golf courses are often artificial environments, relying on non-native grass and plants that suck down water and disturb wildlife," writes Aspinwall. "It’s an utterly unsustainable path—one that’s led many golfers and course designers to embrace the idea that, to survive, golf will have to learn from its own origins."
This nuance is a welcome sight. It is not the case that all golf courses are inherently wasteful of water and therefore evil. It's more that the ostentatiously overbuilt courses of the latter decades of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century are in need of rethinking in the face of mounting environmental pressures.
Outgoing American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA) president Jason Straka provides some key context to golf's role in its own preservation throughout the article. Straka points out that golf course operators and architects are constantly looking for ways to reduce water usage. Straka cites his Fry/Straka Global Design firm's 2015 renovation of Los Robles Greens, a California municipal course built in the 1960s, as a success story. By reducing the amount of irrigated turf and introducing drought-resistant vegetation throughout the course property, the course uses 25% less water than it used to.
California and Arizona are set to become the front lines of golf's confrontation with water usage in the coming years. Not only is Phoenix America's fastest-growing large city, suburbs Buckeye and Queen Creek were listed among the country's five fastest-growing overall cities in 2021. The inflow of new residents to the area is a bigger challenge to the area's water resources, but golf will be an increasingly easy target because it will continue to experience downstream pressure from the situation.
If the game is to evolve into a significantly more environmentally friendly one, American golfers are going to need to help course operators and organizations by exhibiting some compassion and understanding when it comes to course conditions, especially in drought-stressed areas. Several warm-weather destinations spend millions of dollars and pump millions of gallons of waters onto fairways each autumn in order to create a thick carpet of lush poa trivialis, rye or annual bluegrass over the top of natural, seasonally dormant, tan Bermuda grass. This process forces many courses to close for up to three weeks while the new grass establishes itself. Many course marketers, pros and officials I have spoken to in these areas remain convinced that golfers will simply stop showing up if they are not greeted with unnaturally green wall-to-wall conditions. This may be true to a certain extent, but I would like to think that golfers grow savvier every year when it comes to basic understanding of the turf they play on. Overseeded golf courses are slow and soft. Slow and soft golf courses are less fun to play than firm, fast ones.
An early-December round at San Vicente Golf Resort northeast of San Diego was instructive. After I had finished, one of the assistant pros I spoke to in the pro shop was almost apologetic about the fact that the course's Bermuda fairways had gone light-brown for the winter. There was no need to apologize - the firmness of the fairways, plus the perfect greens, helped make it one of my favorite playing experiences of the year. That the entire golf course wasn't obnoxiously green could not have mattered less to me. Here's hoping that more golfers will take this stance, and will give courses permission to use even less water while still presenting a playable surface so that our favorites will still be available to our great-grandchildren.
More golf course news and notes
WAKE-ROBIN GIVES BACK - Founded in 1937 while most golf courses were segregated, America's oldest golf club for Black women is strong and continues to provide opportunities for developing golfers in the community. [LINK: NBC Nightly News]
BYE-BYE DRIVING RANGE - One club in England's golf hotbed is looking to remove its practice range in favor of hitting nets and a simulator. [LINK: The Golf Business]
JT BETS BIG ON SHORT COURSES - Justin Timberlake is investing in 3's, a short-course/golfertainment concept with its first location in Greenville, S.C. With the pop star's backing, look for more locations to open in the coming years. [LINK: PR Newswire]
NEW BUNKERS, NEW NAME - North Carolina golfers will need to retrain their memories, as the former Scotch Hall Preserve golf course, located in the eastern part of the state, is now called Occano. The semi-private layout has also undergone some renovation work by architect Brandon Johnson, who co-leads the Arnold Palmer Design Company, which laid out the original course in 2009. [LINK: Golf Course Architecture]
ARE YOU PLAYING IN THIS WEATHER? - The 7th at Pebble Beach Golf Links is barely 100 yards and it plays downhill. This golfer hit driver, and nearly made the ace of a lifetime.
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