worth reading Hitting the Skids

Beware the golf designer with a newspaper column and a bone to pick.

I refer to Richard Mandell, who writes for the Washington Times. This week, the Pinehurst, North Carolina-based designer goes on a rant about an increasingly familiar topic: 20 years' worth of "wasteful spending" on golf courses with "ridiculously high green fees" that don't make for a sustainable golf industry.

Not surprisingly, Mandell's major gripe involves the spate of celebrity-designed golf courses that have captured so much attention in recent years. An "over-abundance of over-priced golf courses," he calls them, most of them built to sell houses for "cookie-cutter homesteads." These courses, he argues, look good on magazine covers but are mostly forgettable and, due to their length and difficulty, hardly playable.

For years as a golf course architect, I have seen oodles and oodles of cash go into construction of a golf course for the sole purpose of selling real estate, Mandell writes. No one ever heeded the warnings that we as an industry were spending way too much to build golf courses that few people would find enjoyment in.

Mandell's column is called "The Subprime Mortgage Crisis and Subpar Future of Golf."