Drought is making it harder for golf lovers to justify the game’s copious use of water
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Golf is played by rich dickheads who got or stay rich by not giving a fuck about anything or anyone, so … no
Depending on the area the golf course is located in I guess. It’s definitely something bank rolled by rich dickheads, but I do see a lot of blue collar folks owning or renting golf clubs in my area. Probably because it’s a reasonably cheap way to spend a day during your weekend doing an activity.
Now I don’t intend to defend the rich, the owners of golf courses, and the rich that bank roll them. We should be holding their feet to the flames.
what I never got is why golfers and golf course management companies are obsessed with sticking their courses right in the middle of cities. It makes sense that they’d want it to be easy to travel to the course. But golf originated as a rural game that people played on the treeless rolling hills of eastern Scotland. So, why not continue that? There’s plenty of space available outside cities, especially in the US, and to me it just makes sense to put golf courses there.
Like there’s a golf course right in the middle of the town I live in and it’s just such a nuisance for everybody. It’s next to a freeway too so I can’t imagine it’s very pleasant to play on it. It blocks so many roads and is right in the middle of an area that is almost overflowing with housing necessity. There’s another one that serves my town but it’s on the outskirts, probably a 20 minute drive or 45 minutes by bus. As far as I can tell, it’s never really upset anybody, not nearly as much as the one right in the middle.
There’s plenty of space available outside cities
My city has a few old golf courses, but they were literally built before the surrounding areas eventually got developed. I suspect a lot of the golf courses you’re talking about originally were on the outskirts of populated areas, until population expanded past them. At that point, they might not want to move.
Can golf be played on non-grass green surfaces that don’t require as much water?
Mini golf can at the very least.
Competitions should go over to crazy golf, it’d be more fun to watch then, not use water, and use less space too … imagine how crazy pro-level crazy golf courses could be!
Maintaining that much turf probably isn’t very environmentally friendly, either.
Maybe the better way forward is for other versions of the game to increase in popularity. Obviously there’s mini golf/putt putt, but there’s also stuff like Top Golf (digitized driving range with almost a bowling-like game options using those sensors), all sorts of indoor golf simulators. If VR/AR gets better, we might see some of these other types of games become more practical replacements or spinoffs from the traditional outdoor game.
Did you follow the F1 season in 2020 when they went to VR racing because of COVID? They ran into a number of (solvable) problems there, and ultimately switched back to real car racing sooner than they should have for that reason. The momentum behind the existing structure is just too great, and there’s too much money behind things staying the way that they are.
I imagine that golf would run into similar barriers.
I was envisioning something more like an alternative version of the sport that turns into its own thing for amateurs, rather than as a direct replacement for the top professional tiers.
Formula 1 exists, sure, but so does all sorts of other kinds of motorsport, with all sorts of different kinds of vehicles and budgets. Rather than migrate Formula 1 over to electric vehicles, for example, the FIA just created a separate Formula E series that doesn’t replace F1. Similarly, there are lots of non-FIA racing sports that have much, much smaller budgets, to make the sport more accessible to people, from go-karts to street legal cars to motorcycles to all sorts of other vehicles.
After all, a lot of us like to play sports recreationally with modified rules than what the very, very top tier professionals play. A 3-on-3 half court basketball game is still basketball, and basketball courts can be built that accommodate that without necessarily accommodating the full court necessary for the official professional rules.
If everyone simply stopped playing golf, would anyone even notice it was gone in a year?
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