talking points Costs and Hidden Costs

With the possible exception of Gary Player, no celebrity designer talks more about sustainable golf practices than Greg Norman. (Never mind that Great White hasn't as yet actually delivered a “sustainable” course.) Here are Norman's latest comments on the topic, as they appeared in a transcript of a press conference at the Shark Shootout:

I don't think we'll ever get back to days of building 450 golf courses a year in America. That's done. I mean, that's history. . . .

If America wants to sit back, or our industry wants to sit back and take a study of what's happened since the 80s to where we are here today, I think the one word that really resonates, as far as I'm concerned . . . is sustainability.

Build golf courses with sustainability. And sustainability is not going out there with the slash-and-burn approach and spend $20 million on building a golf course when it should have only been 10. The unlimited budget approach is done now, unless you have a sugar daddy who wants to come in and just build a golf course for himself.

The responsibility now for anybody in the United States and the rest of the world is to build golf courses that can sustain, generation after generation after generation.

The ongoing cost of the construction of a golf course is huge. The sustainability from environmental issues are huge. So you've got to be able to make sure those costs are kept down to a minimum, because the cost of living always escalates. So if you start in with a big price tag, that price tag never really gets reduced. It keeps getting higher and higher and higher.

When we look back at what happened in the 80s in America, a lot of the golf courses that were built, you had to have hand labor to maintain them. So then the annual dues are very, very expensive, and those annual dues keep multiplying and going up and up and up.

Note to Greg: It's time to put your money where your mouth is.