Q&A With David Owen

The release of David Owen's lastest book, Green Metropolis, coincides with a powerful look at golf's sustainability in the November, 2009 Golf Digest.

GS: Your November Golf Digest feature lays out a pretty strong case for changes in the way we view golf courses and how they interact with the environment. Your bold conclusion seemed to say that no matter what we do conservation wise, shrinking the golf landscape is the top priority and to do so we must reassess the chase for distance. Do you think there's any scenario where this could happen?
 
It would take some courage from the game’s governing bodies—something they haven’t traditionally shown much of. The USGA, instead of tackling distance directly, has done things like spending millions on golf ball research. That’s like addressing climate change by creating a government department to build car engines. The easiest way to reduce golf’s environmental impact, as well as to hold down its rising cost per round, would be to reduce the amount of groomed acreage that the game requires, and the easiest way to begin doing that would be to dial back the golf ball. Doing that wouldn’t be sexy, but making unsexy decisions is what nonprofit governing bodies are for.
 
GS: Who would you like to see take the lead on this and how would you sell it to golfers that a distance rollback is the best thing for everyone involved?
 
DO: In the ideal scenario, the USGA, the R&A, the PGA Tour, the PGA of America, the European PGA Tour, the tournament committee of the Augusta National Golf Club, and anybody else with influence over the game would agree that it’s crazy for an expensive sport with shrinking participation to continue driving up its own costs. Longer clubs and balls lead to longer golf courses, which require more maintenance and consume more real estate, water, fertilizer, pesticide, and fuel, thereby driving up both maintenance budgets and greens fees, and driving away players. Manufacturers will probably scream—they have in the past—but they don’t need distance to compete. Making putters and wedges is usually more profitable than making irons, but nobody buys a putter or a wedge because it hits the ball farther. Let manufacturers compete on accuracy instead of yardage. Let them make their equipment so accurate that we can get by with smaller greens and half-width fairways, which would cost less to maintain.
 
GS: It seems as if the argument would be aided by numbers that say, if the Overall Distance Standard was dropped by X amount, X number of acres less would be needed for golf, and therefore, X amount of energy, water and money would be saved annually. How much of a rollback do you think would make a difference for existing courses?
 
DO: I have no idea what the numbers are. And, of course, making a long golf course shorter without ruining it or spending a fortune isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. But the lousy economy is shrinking golf’s landscape right now. Between 1990 and 2008, according to the National Golf Foundation, the number of golf courses in the United States grew by almost 25 percent, from fewer than 13,000 to roughly 16,000, yet during much of that same period participation by golfers actually fell. In fact, Americans played 20 million fewer rounds in 2008 than they did in 2000—and the decline has presumably accelerated since then, as the economy has tanked. Those forces, right now, are driving marginal courses out of business, pushing us back toward where we were in 1990. The resulting contraction will be good for the survivors, because the golfers who remain won’t be spread so thin, but bankruptcy is a very blunt instrument of change. It would make more sense to try to wind golf back in a more orderly way.
 
GS: You write that the trick is to find a "sustainable balance." Do you think the economic collapse is actually making this a possible path for golf's future, or will it just be another example where the game's leaders are just saying what they think needs to be said to cover their rear ends?
 
DO: I have no idea what the game’s leaders are saying. Many, I would guess, figure that technology will save the day—that, for example, somebody will come up with a type of turf grass that doesn’t need to be watered, fertilized, or mowed, and everything will be fine. But technological breakthroughs are at least as likely to increase costs as to reduce them—and, besides, we already understand the technology of making things smaller. The problem is that low-tech solutions don’t seem very glamorous to most people. I know a married couple who are getting ready to build a new house. The wife read a book about the environment and got all excited, and suggested to her husband that they make the house green. He said, “Good idea. Let’s make it 2,000 square feet instead of 8,000,” and she said, “That’s not what I meant!”
 
GS:  You get around a lot in your work for the New Yorker and you still play a fair amount. Do you hear a lot of negative feelings directed toward golf and if so, do you think much of it comes from the game's image as a resource waster? Has animosity toward the game gotten worse recently?
 
DO: I don’t know that animosity has increased. In fact, I think golf is still enjoying the image upgrade it got from the rise Tiger Woods. But golf’s leaders should worry less about the game’s image and more about its rising cost per round.
 
GS: On another subject, in the October 12 New Yorker you profile of Nell Minow, the influential independent researcher who co-founded The Corporate Library and who believes CEO compensation is "doing more to destroy capitalism than Marx." You write about the subscription database she runs which includes SEC filings, contracts and background information, including "in one case, overlapping golf-club memberships of corporate directors."  Did you find out any more about this and what it might say for the role certain clubs play in the corporate world?
 
DO: That club was Augusta National, and the membership list was one that was made public back in the Martha Burke days. Lots of business gets done on golf courses, but I think golf-playing corporate hotshots are more likely to think about the effect that their business relationships might have on their golf club memberships than the other way around. Will serving on that board make me more likely to be invited to join Seminole?—that sort of thing.
 
GS:  Back to golf and the environment. Do you think there's ever a day when golf courses could be viewed as environment beacons, or is mere survival and basic sustainability the real goal at this point?
 
DO: Golf, like all human activities, will always exact an environmental cost. But it’s worth remembering that the first golf boom in the United States, back in the late 1800s, took place at a time when the equipment was primitive and playing conditions were extraordinarily crude—no four-piece balls, no watering systems, no fungicides, no greens mowers. Anybody who has ever played cross-country golf on a closed course in the middle of the winter knows that the game doesn’t have to be played on a 7,500-yard billiard table in order to be compelling.

My home course is a century old. It has just nine holes, and it fits on 40 acres—about half the size the USGA’s recommended minimum for a nine-hole course. To play 18 holes you play it twice, from different tees, and the whole thing, if you stretch it out to the absolute tips, measures barely 6,000 yards. Big-hitting members sometimes used to complain that it was outdated, and that we’d eventually have to either abandon it or find a way to make it a thousand yards longer, but it now seems serendipitously well-suited to the times, and to our likely environmental predicament in the years ahead. My club’s costs are low because we don’t have much acreage to maintain, and the course is short enough to allow four players on foot to play 18 holes in three hours. As a result, we’ve been able to keep our dues under control, and, although the stalled economy has hurt us, we haven’t suffered the sort of membership crisis that some other clubs in our area have. I think we represent one possible model for the future—and I’m sure there are others.

Pinehurst #2 Finally Getting The Treatment It Deserves

If you ever bemoan the rankings, just remember they do serve a positive purpose as evidenced by Pinehurst #2's recent and well deserved plummet down the list for the architectural sterilization driven in part by a cattle-herd operational mentality which decided sandy pine scrub would slow down play. Seems they have gotten the message, because as Ron Green Jr. reports (thanks reader Gene), Coore and Crenshaw are being hired to return some soul to the place:

Tinkering with what is considered Donald Ross' masterpiece is a delicate matter, and Pinehurst president Don Padgett III is taking a careful approach.

He has consulted with Coore and Crenshaw as well as Mike Davis, senior director of rules and competitions for the USGA, who will oversee the set-up for the U.S. Opens.

"They are trying to develop a concept to restore the course to a lot of the original design criteria while, at the same time, have it be a championship venue for the Opens," Padgett said this week.

And...

The main alterations would involve bringing back more of the sandy areas dotted with wire grass off the fairways, places where there is now rough. It would be similar, Padgett said, to how the course was in the 1930s and 1940s when Ross lived in the area and worked on it.

"What people expect of No.2 has gone away," Padgett said. "I think they (Coore and Crenshaw) plan to bring that back."

Padgett said if the plan moves forward, it will be at least a year, maybe longer, before work begins.

"I'm just glad to be headed in the right direction," Padgett said.

Me too!

"Arguably what's at stake is the future of San Francisco public golf, and by extension, the value of public golf everywhere."

Miraculously no one has asked yet how the PGA Tour and City of San Francisco spent $23 million and got a functional but ultimately disappointing Harding Park redesign. Brad Klein noted quite accurately that "a round here produces the sense of waiting for something to happen that never quite materializes."

Which is why I suppose the Presidents Cup re-routing--a blatant move for the corporate tent folks as Ron Whitten documents in Golf World--doesn't really matter much. If you know the course and want to get a nice feel for the new sequencing, check out Brett Avery and Golf World's interactive map.

Meanwhile, SF native Jaime Diaz makes the case that no matter what you might feel about the course, this is a huge week for public golf with two courses fighting for their existence and beleaguered Harding looking to stay on the PGA Tour's radar.

R&A Contemplating Out-Of-Bounds Tee For Road Hole

Earlier this week it was noted here (courtesy of Trevor Immelman's Tweet) that the Road Hole still features a silly roadblock of rough about 310 yards off the tee.

Now we learn this from John Hopkins' Spike Bar column:

An intriguing whisper was circulating in St Andrews recently. The Royal and Ancient have asked a leading player his thoughts on the positioning of a new tee on the 17th, the famous Road Hole. The tee would be 40 yards back from the existing one and therefore over the fence, which used to be the line of the old railway line from Leuchars. Clearly, the 2010 Open, the 150th anniversary of the event next July, is on the minds of the R&A.

First, as a blogger who has made a study of the R&A's emasculation of rota courses in place of regulating distance, this one will be particularly fun since it's only the most famous hole in golf.

Second, isn't it a bit late in the game to be scouting out a possible new tee for a major that is only ninth months away? Particularly when the tee in question will be off the property and driving over a stone wall and a billboard for the Old Course hotel? I can only imagine how tastefully it will erupt out of the landscape.

At least we know the R&A has experience now with this hole off-course tee thing when it went over so well last time in 2005 when they couldn't really figure out the whole OB thing on No. 2.