talking points More Is Less

USA Today recently interviewed Gary Player. Here's Player's response to the question, "What's your take on the state of the game?"

It's healthy, but we've got to stop making golf courses longer, because it means you've got to use more water, more oil, more labor, more fertilizer -- and these are all hurting the game. . . .


The whole economic problem we're facing now is because of greed, and golf is no different. From Timbuktu to Washington, D.C. to Augusta, everyone made their golf courses longer. Why? We wasted hundreds of millions of dollars. . . .

We need our leaders in golf to make the right decisions. We haven't started to see all the problems we're going to have with water. Nobody should be getting a permit to build a golf course unless they are using effluent water. Nobody should be using potable water. I designed a golf course on my ranch which is 80 percent water free, with no fertilizer. That's the wave of the future, and it's going to take a new generation of leaders to figure that out.