Our Achilles' heel

Golf is an amazingly resilient thing. Nothing ever seems to be able to kill it.

Wars couldn’t kill golf. Since the game’s inception, we’ve been through several world conflagrations and an endless number of regional conflicts. In every case, golf went to war along with tanks and guns and soldiers. If anything, wars helped to bring golf around the globe. Weird, huh?

Social critics couldn’t kill golf. Just a few decades ago, golf took a major hit because too many clubs still quietly or even not so quietly excluded people of color and women from membership. The club ethos changed but the game prevailed in the long run and the barriers to membership have largely fallen away. Today, 99 percent of clubs would happily accept a green-skinned hermaphroditic blob from the planet Xanthos if its initiation check cleared.

Environmental activists couldn’t kill golf. They came at us with both barrels in the ‘80s and ‘90s with charges that we were strewing terrible poisons about Mother Earth with reckless abandon to create aesthetic wonderlands for the enjoyment of the rich. We changed practices, products evolved and we mostly got way better at telling our story. The activists moved on to fry bigger fish like fictionalizing global warming data and producing reality TV shows about a bunch of granola-heads who bravely chase down evil Japanese whaling vessels to save the noble leviathans.

The self-inflicted pain of overbuilding and bad management couldn’t even kill golf. We created so much competition for play that the average schmuck can discount shop online or otherwise find a round of golf for half of what it should cost. Many facilities have been managed in ways that would make an undergrad business student’s head explode, yet few courses ever completely fail despite our best attempts to screw up our own market.

Even a lousy economy and a deep recession couldn’t kill golf. People “downsized” their golf choices and chose a $40 round instead of an $80 round. Some dropped memberships but few turned away from the game. Rounds have stayed largely flat and the weather is still a far bigger factor in the overall health of the market than the Dow Jones Index.

Yet, we do have an Achilles’ heel.

Like Achilles, we really only have one truly fatal vulnerability – water. Without it, we will be a distant memory covered by the sands of time.

That may sound melodramatic but it’s not. I’ll put this in simplest terms. Water is a finite resource and we use a lot of it. We do – at best – a half-assed job of justifying our consumption under normal circumstances. When pressed by drought restrictions or threat of regulation, we do a better job of showing we’re careful users who employ a lot of people and create environmental and community benefits. But with every passing year, the spigot handle will turn counterclockwise just a little bit more. Does anyone honestly believe that government and society will still be allowing us to use the same amount of water we use today in 10, 20 or 30 years? If you do, you’re smoking crack.

There is zero doubt in my mind that water use reduction will be mandatory at some point in the future. Not “desirable.” Not “urged.” Mandatory.

Could the golf business as we know it survive if some catastrophic 9/11-type event impacted the Great Lakes and there was a mandatory 50 percent reduction in water usage imposed upon us tomorrow?
How about if – as some folks advocate – we dramatically raised the price of water for commercial use? How many of the thousands of courses that are teetering on the economic brink right now would just close up shop?

What if water, as a resource, was nationalized and all private wells, lakes and ponds simply became government property? Think that couldn’t happen? I’ll bet the people who used to own the oil reserves down in Venezuela thought the same thing before Hugo Chavez came along.

Yes, I am trying to scare the crap out of you because all of those things I just mentioned are very possible and you can’t just pretend they aren’t. But, what’s far more likely is that golf’s water usage will be stepped down over the next few decades – faster in some regions and slower in others – as part of a negotiated process. It probably won’t happen overnight but, mark my words, we will have less to use and it will significantly change the product we offer and how we manage our business.

Our Achilles’ heel sits exposed and waiting. Sooner or later, an arrow will find it. What will you do in the meantime to prepare for that day?