No golf for me

I’ve just spent a week in Las Vegas, at a resort of all places. For work, not play. During this time I came to the realization that I'm not a "golf guy."

There are people who love golf courses. Many of them. They pay extra to live on the edge of a golf course. They pay lots of money to spend time on the golf course hitting a little ball across a carpet of lawn to a little hole. Clearly, I’m not one of them, although there was a time where I lived in a condo on the edge of a golf course, finding balls in my front yard from time to time. I’ve heard people wax ecstatic about golf, how they love the time they spend in nature, on the beautiful manicured course, being outdoors, swinging a club. Golf, it seems to me is an excuse for some to spend time out of doors, and a chance to be social. It is something to do, and to talk about. I have no problem with that.

The golf course, on the other hand, I find horrific. It is a sterile representation of nature, a environmental toxic dump of chemicals and artificiality. You could argue that it is no different from any other garden, where someone carves out a space of their own to create their own version of paradise. In this sense, any garden is artificiality, a destruction of what is naturally there, where someone can put their own energy into the space. In this sense, no garden is sustainable. A garden requires the constant input of energy to maintain its state. Nature will, quickly or slowly, take back the space once it is ignored.

"Andalusian Garden" at the Loews Lake Las Vegas Resort


But in contrast to the pleasure gardens of the resort that I stayed at in Las Vegas last week, the golf course takes much more acreage, has a much lower range of species that inhabit each unit space, and utilizes more water, chemicals, petroleum products than a garden, and may be enjoyed by fewer people at a time than a garden. There are those that would argue with the last few points. A display at The Springs Preserve, essentially Las Vegas’ version of a botanic garden reported that that golf courses were not water wasteful: they used only 10% of the city’s water. But when we’re talking billions of gallons of water, that’s a lot of water. How many people utilize the golf courses? I’d bet that the average middle class person rarely or never uses the golf courses, never mind 10% of the population.

Even if water use was insignificant, I’d find the golf course to be downright ugly. In a sense, there is some relation to the Japanese garden, in its intense management, constant attention, constant pruning, and being an abstraction of nature. I suppose you could consider the space to be a spare meditative space, on the grand scale of America rather than the tight spaces of Japan. But in contrast to those Japanese gardens such as Ryoan-ji, the golf course has nothing to hold my attention. There is no reason for me to spend time in the space, other than passing through. It’s a good thing that there is a game of golf, for it gives someone something to do in the space, something to focus upon. But now I’m just getting ornery. There are plenty of people who enjoy the space of a golf course. I’m just not one of them.

Garden at The Springs Preserve, Las Vegas