talking points Tom Fazio on Golf and its Discontents

In an interview posted at GolfTheMidAtlantic.com in April, Tom Fazio talked with Jeffrey Randall about the current state of golf development in the United States.

Fazio isn't hopeful about the near term and won't predict when things will get better. Nonetheless, he believes the industry will work its way through the hard times and, with the economy improving, he's looking forward to designing more courses both in the United States and around the world

Here's a little of what Fazio had to say.

On whether the golf market will improve anytime soon: No. No. And the reason for that is, we have an oversupply of golf courses. We're not going to go back to where we were several years ago, where we had a couple hundred golf courses opening every year. Do the math. From 1992 to 2006 or 2007, we had an average of probably 250 golf courses opening up every year. In that 15 or so years, that's about 3,750 golf courses of some fashion or form.

If you look at the marketplace, you only need so many. And if you look at the economics, we have this supply of them, and now we have to fill them up. And that's what it's going to take in order for there to be any demand to build more.

On reports that as many as 20 percent of the existing U.S. golf facilities will close over the next five years: It's probably possible. It's close to it. Again, that's a very negative way to look at it, but that's also the real world. It's not because golf is bad. Yeah, maybe it's because golf is expensive, but it's our society, it's our timing.

Or maybe golf isn't for everybody. Maybe we don't need to grow the game, because it doesn't fit.

On when the golf business will recover: I don't know. I think it'll recover, but . . . I don't think we're going to go back to a couple hundred golf courses being built every year. I don't think we're going to go back to the boom of what we saw for a long period of time.

On where golf development goes from here: I don't see what we're going through as being a serious problem in the big-picture scheme of things. I think it's just one of the cycles we're in. We're going to have these downturns, and we're going to have these problem places, but we're going to work through it because of the oversupply. I just don't see it all as doom and gloom.

Okay, let's assume that not many new courses are going to be designed in the near future, so golf course architects . . . won't have as many golf courses to design. Well, so what? That's just the way it is.