I read a book about shade. Throw shade on me. I can handle minimal, mild and severe heckling.
Writers, especially ones who once covered major college football, develop crocodile skin. Even golf maintenance pros agitated from the angst of Summer 2025 are tame compared to college football fans. Trust me on this.
And trust me when I say a school from the Southeast will win the 2025-26 College Football Playoff. Don’t ask me which one. We suspect the champion will boast an animal as a mascot and it won’t be the program whose patrons shout “WAR EAGLE.”
Why would an advocate for golf maintenance professionals read a book like environmental journalist Sam Bloch’s recently released “Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource?” Strolls through the local library while writing copy for this publication yield curiosity-filling finds. I read inside jackets and connect topics to the golf industry. I need a life! Thankfully, we’ve reached the intersection of college football’s commencement and brilliant weather. We now have new hoodies to wear, pumpkin coffee to savor and orangish lagers to consume.
Before reading Bloch’s thorough case for incorporating more shade into communities, I rarely pondered the importance of natural and artificial outdoor sun covering. I once fully endorsed the eradication of almost every tree from nearly every American golf course. Unless mythical firs and redwoods (in the Pacific Northwest only), lovely Loblolly pines (in the Carolinas only) or venerable live oaks (in the Lowcountry only) lined corridors, I staunchly believed trees had no place near important playing surfaces.
I realized I might be, well, in the woods with my thinking after I actually started listening instead of preaching to ordinary golfers. I learned somebody can take being an advocate for ideal growing environments too far. Many of us in the industry forget the aesthetic beauty, strategic value and cooling capabilities of trees attract ordinary people to golf.
Parkland courses resonate with North American golfers who will never travel to the Oregon coast, the middle of Wisconsin or Nova Scotia on a five-figure golf excursion. By the way, the subset of golfers who play their rounds at tree-lined courses with green fees under $100 comprise the bulk of the North American golf population.
Shade, Bloch argues, is a vital natural resource because it cools cities, landscapes and, most importantly, individuals. Bloch doesn’t reference golf in the book. Agriculture represents the focus of a harrowing chapter about the dangers of working for prolonged stretches in outdoor environments lacking shade. Golf courses and farms present similar working conditions to laborers, including heightened risk of heat illness. Golf courses contrast farms because customers also endure wicked heat when consuming the product.
Trees provide two layers of safety on golf courses: from balls flying into bodies and from the sun’s damaging effects. Direct sunlight is rarely taken into consideration in heat index figures listed on many weather apps. Hot days are likely hotter than what your apps indicate.
Trees and turf can be a tangled mix. Millions of trees have been removed from golf courses in the right places, for the right reasons, over the past decade. But effective tree management might be trending toward reckless annihilation. Architects, committees, contractors, consultants and superintendents face delicate balances when determining proper arbor palettes.
Bloch rambles into radical concepts such as solar radiation modification and stratospheric aerosol injection toward the end of “Shade.” He seems desperate to influence policy rather than objectively enlighten readers, which is sadly a journalistic norm these days.
A well-placed zinger always helps writers win back readers. Bloch wittingly declares in the final line of his epilogue, “The conversation about shade has just begun.”
Perhaps a few more shady conversations in the golf industry can be a good thing.
Got it.
Now return to your heckling.
Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s publisher + editor-in-chief. He wrote this column from his second-floor home office, which overlooks an HOA backyard that underwent a significant tree removal and shade reduction program earlier this year.
