A golfer friend once told me, "Golf is the greatest game of all time for three reasons: it combines a learned skill with mental strength to win, it is a sport you cannot master and it is the only game where you can lick your balls and no one will look at you funny." (Some golfers actually lick their golf balls to clean off dirt and grass-caked golf balls.)
Save for some childhood outings to the miniature golf course, I had never been golfing. Every day at work, my coworkers regale me with tales of the glories and joys of golf. So I decided maybe I should pick up a club and experience this mind-teasing sport.
Work colleagues, whose entire lives revolve around their next tee-time, refused to take me golfing. As a novice, I would slow up their game. Instead, they brought some clubs to work and let me practice putting into a tipped drinking glass down a 30-foot hallway. Golf was a game of concentration, and precision, they explained. I had to learn to compensate for the irregularities and contours in the carpet and floor. They finally had to shut the office door at the end of the hallway...something about overshooting.
Two years, they said cautiously, before I would be good enough to really enjoy the sport. Two years of frustration and agony before I could feel fulfillment whacking a little white ball? I still wanted to move beyond putting, so I turned to some childhood friends to take me out on the greens. I figured, if they've put up with me this long, a few hours on a golf course won't drastically change our relationship.
We arrived at Mulligan's, a course in the south end of the Salt Lake Valley, and I went directly to the snack bar to order coffee. I'd overslept on this historic day and I needed my caffeine fix, but all the club house snack bar offered were blue raspberry and mango passion peach slushies, ice cream, and fountain drinks. No coffee. So at 8:30 in the morning I had to drink Coca-Cola to get my morning buzz. Already, skeptical about the sport, this wasn't a good start.
My friend Tony told me not to get too upset, continuously missing the ball would be much more frustrating than any drink mishap. He reminded me, "Trying is the first step to failure."
After shooting nine holes of golf, I was well on my way to failure: my score was almost triple the par, the ponds were filled with my golf balls and a string of divots like a dotted line followed my golf trail. And yet, aside from my utter lack of skill, I have to admit, I did enjoy myself.
But beyond the pleasure of this sport, the upkeep and maintenance of golf courses, mainly water waste and pesticide use, are endangering water quality and water availability.
Utah is one of the driest states in the country, yet our per capita water use is the highest in the nation. Our water prices rank well below the national average, but instead of increasing water prices and water conservation programs, Utah Water Districts continue to propose new dam projects.
Golf courses add to Utah's water waste frenzy, using unimaginable amounts of water. There are about 100 golf courses in Utah. Their locations dot a Utah map from Logan to St.George. At 100 acres per golf course, Kentucky Bluegrass covers over 10,000 acres of Utah's landscape from its Red Rock country to its alpine mountains. In urban areas, they are the only open space for miles.
According to the Utah Division of Water Rights, every 18-hole golf course sucks up about a million gallons of water per day. Statewide, that's approximately 100-million gallons of water daily. An average family uses about 325,900 gallons of water annually. So, in one day, a single 18-hole golf course uses more water than three families would use in a year. Golf courses are open about 190 days a year, which means 19-billion gallons of water are used in Utah to keep manicured golf lawns from going brown.
Beyond the water waste, golf courses are known for their abundant use of pesticides and insecticides to maintain the greens. I went to the library to search the impact of pesticides on golf courses. I did a national newspaper search, keyword: golf courses and pesticides. Five-hundred documents popped up. I changed the search and added Utah, number of documents found: 0. This issue has not been touched in the media.
According to a 1991 study by New York state's attorney general, golf courses in the Long Island area annually used more than 50,000 pounds of pesticides, which is about 18 pounds per acre. That was almost seven times more than farmers used on their crops and twice as much as homeowners used on their private lawns. Long Island golf courses were built on old sand dunes. Because sand is so porous, it cannot absorb the chemicals and they leech into the ground water and now the residents are facing major water pollution problems.
Golf course pesticide use is a pressing topic in many states, especially densely populated ones. There is no reason to hope that this problem will magically pass over Utah. Are we going to wait in Utah until it is too late in Utah to solve the water pollution problems? If it is happening in other states, it is most certainly happening here.
With no luck at the library, I turned to state and federal agencies for water quality statistics. I opened the phone book to the blue section and started dialing. I talked to the Division of Water Quality, the EPA Regional Offices, Department of Agriculture, and nobody knew of any studies on ground water pollution from golf courses. Finally, I reached Mark Novak in Water Quality who explained to me that there was "no program to regulate ground water quality from non-point pollution sources." Non-point pollution sources are pollution sources that come from a localized activity or areas such as agriculture, forestry or urban runoff, including golf courses. They do not have a specific point source of entry into a waterway. Examples of point pollution sources are sewage treatment plants and manufacturing or tanning facilities because they have a drainage pipe entering the waterway.
The EPA issues grants to monitor non-point source pollution, but Utah does not take part in the program. Novak explained that golf courses are non-point sources because they are wide areas and there is "no indication that there is a problem with the drinking water in Utah taken from deep wells." But if no one is studying it, how could there be evidence of a problem?
The only rules are that the golf course superintendents have to follow the directions on the chemical solution labels and no questions are asked.
Biology professor at Westminster College, Ty Harrison, says this reasoning is faulty. "The reason they don't control (pesticides) is they assume, if they are using them properly, they will never leech beyond the roots of the grass, because when we have a large rainfall that puts an inch or two of rain on the sod, all the toxic materials are carried beyond the grass roots into the ground water."
Harrison says people should be concerned about golf courses for many reasons: water pollution, loss of natural habitat and even the air pollution caused by the two-stroke engine lawn mowers.
Golf courses once used arsenic to control crab grass and weeds. The practice was eventually fazed out, but no one knows if there was any long term contamination to the drinking water.
"Old golf courses are heavily contaminated with arsenic," said Harrison, "It is so toxic that the EPA is hauling even trace amounts of arsenic from old smelters and superfund sites."
A University of Iowa study showed that golf course superintendents have a higher death rate than the average population from lung and brain cancer. Researchers also found large intestine and prostate cancer were higher in this group. It is difficult to prove the high cancer rates were directly related to pesticide exposure, but other studies, which looked at farmers exposed to pesticides, also showed an elevated cancer risk. movetext
How much damage the pesticides can cause is sometimes determined by the location of the course. There is one golf course in Salt Lake that shows the irresponsibility of the golf course frenzy. Salt Lake County built the Old Mill Golf Course on an old gravel pit, right on the Wasatch fault.
"Golf courses should never be sited on faults, good planners would never put a golf course on a fault," Harrison said. Faults are usually on deep ground water recharge areas, so the potential permanent pollution damage is great. The fact that the course was built on a gravel pit means that the ground cannot keep the pesticides from going into the deep ground water. Harrison says any proposed golf course should be examined and studied by a geologist. But not only are there few laws controlling pesticide use, there are no laws monitoring where golf courses should be built.
The county monitored a well close to the course and right after the golf course was built, the nitrate levels in the well skyrocketed. The county says the levels only increased during the construction and the pesticides should not seep beyond the golf course during normal maintenance. They said they would rather abandon the well than close down the golf course.
To its players, golf is sacred, so revered that no one is willing to get into a turf battle over its possible hazards. Golfers aren't going to stop playing golf because of some chemicals and water waste. It would be ridiculous and naive even to ask, but we can re-evaluate the way golf courses are managed and maintained.
There are alternatives to the water guzzling, chemically induced greens: organic golf courses are springing up all over the country and the trend has even hit as close to Utah as Colorado.
In 1994, the Applewood Golf Course in Golden, Colorado went pesticide-free. The decision had economic motivations. The course sat on top of the aquifer that the Coors Brewing Company uses to make its beer. They knew if they didn't change their practices, they would have to start marketing beer with labels like Nitrate Delight and Carcinogens-in-a-Can. So, instead of waiting until the ground water was permanently contaminated, they reconstructed the greens.
The superintendent planted grasses that need less water and put grasses only on the fairways and the greens...the rough was really rough. They cut water use from 100-million gallons a year to 40 million. The 140 acre golf course, now has only about 50 acres of fescues grass, which require less water. When watering levels are decreased, only drought-tolerant grass will survive. The rest of the course was replaced with tall native wheat grass, which now is used by deer and coyote for habitat. Bald eagles and red-tailed hawks started to come back to the area because of newly planted trees and shrubs. The birds work as natural insecticides, eating the bugs that would pester players. Currant and berry bushes were planted by the ponds to absorb what little fertilizers were used. And if a few dandelions invade the grass, maintenance workers don't spray the entire course, they simply pull the weeds out by hand.
Golfers did have to change the way they played the game, but they didn't have to stop playing. The Golden course shows how humans and nature can attempt to work together. With a few concessions, golf course managers can have some open space without snuffing out the natural environment. Every golf course does not have to re-create Scotland's contoured, emerald hills. Golfers need to come to terms with the fact that we don't live in Scotland. Golfers need to have enough vision to see past their next tee-time and look to a time when clean drinking water will be more important than a good game of golf.
How about a green game of golf?