As of summer 2001, the United States had 16,743 golf courses.
Florida is the state with the most golf courses, followed by California, Michigan, Texas, and New York.
At last count, Myrtle Beach in South Carolina has 123 of them, located along the “Grand Strand,” a 60-mile stretch of traffic-clogged beach highway.
About 400 new golf courses open each year in the United States.
Golf courses now cover about as much of America as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
Another way of looking at that is that the country has one golf hole for every 139 people.
The average nine-hole course covers about 65 acres; the average eighteen-hole course, about 150.
“If you try to fight the course, it will beat you.”
—Lou Graham
Fighting the course might make some sense, though, if a name is any indication. Here are some names of actual golf courses we'd suggest watching out for:
These golf courses may not sound as scary, but we'd still give 'em a pass:
“I use the word ‘bunker’; meaning a pit in which the soil has been exposed and the area covered with sand. I regard the term ‘sand trap’ as an unacceptable Americanization. Its use annoys me almost as much as hearing a golf club called a ‘stick.’ Earthworks, mounds, and the like, without sand, are not ‘bunkers.’”
—Bobby Jones (golf course designer) being grouchy
According to the golf industry, a golf course needs about 40,000 paid rounds of golf each year to make a profit.
Want your own high-end golf course designed by a top course designer? Expect to pay about $7 million dollars to build it.
Otherwise, the rule of thumb is that a golf course will cost from $200,000 to $400,000 per hole.
It wasn't always this way. In the good old days of golfing—a century or two ago—course designers played the terrain as it laid, and they saw their job as simply figuring out the best use of the available features that came with the land. They would pace out the available ground, marking tees and greens with colored stakes. Laying out an eighteen-hole course wouldn't usually take more than a day or two.
Old Tom Morris, legendary golfer and course designer from St. Andrews, Scotland, was one of the leading golf course architects in the 1800s. He charged one English pound a day, plus his expenses, to design a course … and he seldom took more than two days.
You'd think that all that greenery would be a good addition to the environment. Unfortunately not. To make a golf course, designers uproot the native plants and animals living there and replace them with huge expanses of turf.
To keep all that grass green, an average golf course uses about one million gallons of water a day, or the equivalent of a small town's total water usage.
The average golf course uses a staggering 18 pounds of pesticides per acre. (A crop of soybeans, in contrast, typically uses only about a pound of chemicals per acre.)
In 2000, the Anarchist Golfing Association vandalized genetically altered grass that was designed to improve putting greens, causing $300,000 in damage. “Grass, like industrial culture, is invasive,” charged an e-mail taking responsibility that was sent anonymously from a library in Eugene, Oregon.
In developing countries, the creation of golf courses for rich foreigners has become a significant political issue. A group calling itself the Global Anti-Golf Movement was formed to work against building golf courses.
“The transformation of golf memberships into a saleable commodity has resulted in widespread speculation and dubious practices,” says the Global Anti-Golf Movement Manifesto. “In many countries golf course/resort development is in reality often a hit-and-run business. … The bulk of the foreign exchange earned from golf courses and golf tourism does not stay in the local economy but are reaped by a few business people.”
The GAGM Manifesto goes on: “These landscaped foreign systems create stress on local water supplies and soil, at the same time being highly vulnerable to disease and pest attacks. … The construction of golf courses in scenic natural sites, such as forest areas and coral islands, also results in the destruction of biodiversity. … The environmental impacts include water depletion and toxic contamination of the soil, underground and surface water, and the air. This in turn leads to health problems for local communities, populations downstream and even golfers, caddies, and chemical sprayers at golf courses.”
GAGM has designated April 29 as World No-Golf Day. Workers of the world, put down your putters—you have nothing to lose but your slice.
In the 1930s, during what was called the “rinky-dink golf” craze, there were about 50,000 miniature golf courses, including about 3,000 in the “Tom Thumb Golf” chain.
On a cliff hanging over the Pacific Ocean, the sixteenth hole on Cypress Point is a killer. It's the place where Groucho Marx quit golf. Marx loved golf, but one day while playing against TV host Ed Sullivan, he hit five tee shots into the ocean. Rather than tee up again, he calmly picked up his golf bag, carried it to the edge of the cliff, and tossed it into the ocean. Afterward, he explained: “It's not that I'm a poor loser, but I figured if I couldn't beat a fellow with no neck, I've got to be the world's worst golfer and I have no right to be on a course at all.”
Pebble Beach has the highest greens fees in the United States: $275 per round.
The Pebble Beach course was founded by Samuel Morse, whose other claim to fame was that he was the nephew of the guy who invented the telegraph.
The world's largest sand bunker, called Hell's Half Acre, at Pine Valley in Clementon, New Jersey, extends 100 yards along the hole.
The highest golf course in the world is the Tuctu Golf Club in Morococha in Peru—it's 14,335 feet above sea level.
The longest single hole on a golf course is the sixth at the Koolan Island course in Australia, which measures 948 yards and is a par 7 hole.
How do greenskeepers measure the speed of a green? They use a stimpmeter, which is essentially a slanted grooved bar. They roll the ball down the bar and measure its distance. They do that several times from several different directions and average the results.
Believe it or not, a golf company purposely developed a golf ball that would travel only half the distance of normal golf balls—like 140 yards down the fairway. In a game where long drives are usually the ultimate goal, this might seem strange. However, when Jack Nicklaus and his company wanted to build a course on the small Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, he couldn't find enough land for a low enough price to build a full-size course. He decided to make it a smaller scale—about 4,000 yards—and make a rule that only short-range balls could be used. Nicklaus dubbed the new variation “Cayman Golf,” and since then, other half-size courses have been built.
Where's the longest golf course in the world? In Bolton, Massachusetts. The International Golf Club sports an 8,325 yard, par 77 course. It has the largest green in the world, as well—the one on the fifth hole measures 28,000 square feet.
Quick, Caddy, a Sand Wedge! In 1931, Bayly MacArthur was playing in New South Wales, Australia, and hit his ball into what he thought was a bunker. When he stepped into it, however, it turned out to be quicksand. Other golfers heard his cry and pulled MacArthur out.
Uganda's Jinja Golf Course has a couple of interesting additions to the usual golf rules that may not be encountered anywhere else in the world. For instance, if a ball lands near a crocodile and it's deemed unsafe to play it, you may drop another ball. Also, if your ball lands in a hippopotamus footprint, you may lift and drop the ball without incurring penalty. (Don't try invoking these rules at St. Andrews, however—they just won't fly.)
Golfers in Japan are either very lucky or very confused—most courses there have two greens for each hole. There's a good reason for this, actually. Because of climate and weather in that country, one green on each hole is grown with a vigorous, tough native grass that stays playable all year round. The other green is resodded seasonally with the traditional golfer's bent grass, which doesn't survive well in Japan's climate.
“If your ball lands within a club length of a rattlesnake, you are allowed to move your ball,” states a sign of local rules at the Glen Canyon golf course in Arizona.
The Los Angeles Country Club, built in 1897, was originally a dump … literally! Built on an active garbage dump, it originally used tin cans as holes and various piles of garbage as hazards. In its present incarnation, without the cans and old tires, it's considered to be one of the finest courses in the nation and is extremely hard to get in to.
Looking for a little tournament variety? How about this: Every August, Greenland plays host to an odd tournament indeed. Actually, it's put on by the Thule Army Base located at the base of Mount Dundas. The mountain is a steep 720-foot climb that participants scale prior to beginning the rocky, nine-hole, par 36 tourney. Hosts spray paint circles of rocks green on the course, and players must tote—along with their one allotted club and two golf balls—a square of carpet to putt from. The players in the annual tournament receive this certificate of participation:
Let it be know and made a matter of record that: on (date), (your name here) did with reckless abandon and total disregard for life and limb, take golf club in hand and scale the treacherous heights of Mt. Dundas and with a dazzling display of hooks, slices, bad bounces, aerial putts, profanity and lost golf balls, did participate in the annual Mt. Dundas Open, the world's northernmost golf tournament (76°32′ North Latitude). Let it also be known that this task of questionable sanity was accomplished despite near-freezing temperatures, numerous patches of casual Arctic water (snow drifts) and the threat of 18 mph phase winds descending upon the participants with little warning. It is, therefore, with tears in our eyes and fear of certain retribution of Nanok of the North, that we designed do hereby attest that this deed was truly done.
The golf course that is the prototype for all others is the “Old Course” at St. Andrews in Scotland. Lying on ninety-three and a half wind-blown acres, the desolate course was christened by an archbishop in 1552 as a place where the local community could “play at golf, futball, and schuteing.”
The St. Andrews Course wasn't designed by a person but mostly by nature. The sand traps came from sheep burrowing into the sand dunes for shelter from the sea's heavy winds. For centuries, the only grass-cutting at St. Andrews was done by sheep and rabbits. Golf course designers around the world have since gone to great lengths to duplicate artificially what occurred naturally there.
The major golf courses in St. Andrews are not private clubs—they're operated by the Links Management Trust for public benefit.
In 1764, the standard round of golf was established at St. Andrews as eighteen holes. There is an entertaining myth about how that happened, and then there is the true story. First the myth: The guiding council at St. Andrews determined that there were exactly eighteen shots in a quart of whiskey and figured that, golfers drinking at the rate of a shot a hole, eighteen was the right number.
The true story is more prosaic. The Old Course originally had twenty-two holes (actually, eleven holes played one way, then back). However, in the eighteenth century they rearranged the course, and reduced the number to eighteen, in part to make room to build a clubhouse. Because other golf courses used the Old Course as their prototype, eighteen holes became the standard.
Although St. Andrews' Old Course has eighteen holes, there are only eleven greens. Only the first, ninth, seventeenth, and eighteenth have their own greens; the rest share a green with another. The second hole shares with the sixteenth, the third with the fifteenth, and so on, the two numbers always adding up to eighteen.
The Old Course is so “classic” that Sam Snead—accustomed to the overly green, fussily manicured lawns of American golf courses—wondered the first time he saw it in 1946 if it were an abandoned golf course.
Unfortunately, Snead wondered that out loud, offending his hosts. Worse, he brought the wrath of his caddies down on him. They tried to undermine his game by whistling when he was putting, quitting at inopportune times, showing up drunk, and giving him wrong clubs. Nonetheless, Snead managed to win the tournament by four strokes.
The Old Course is the most famous, but it's only one of five golf courses at St. Andrews. There are also the “New” Course (created in 1895), the Jubilee (1897), the Eden (1914), and the Strathtyrum (1993).