Vital Signs, march 1, 2013

     The National Golf Foundation has determined that 490 million rounds of golf were played in the United States last year, an increase of 5.7 percent over the number played in 2011. The group credits “improved weather” for much of the increase, but it believes a gradually improving economy also helped to boost play. “National measurements of consumer confidence and spending have also been slowly and consistently edging upward from dips we saw in the Great Recession,” the NGF notes. “Feelings of personal financial well-being are undoubtedly tied to an individual’s positivity toward all types of discretionary and recreational spending, including golf.” In other words, when people aren’t worried about losing their jobs, they tend to spend more.

     Don’t underestimate the impact that a crazy-warm winter and an early spring can have on the amount of play recorded at U.S. golf properties. Randy Watkins, who owns three golf courses in suburban Jackson, Mississippi, says that last year’s weather “definitely got us ahead of the game” and helped his facilities post a 7 percent increase in rounds played. “Golf can be habitual,” Watkins told the Mississippi Business Journal, “and the earlier in the year folks can play, the more they play the rest of the year. Starting to play earlier in the year is the main thing.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that 2013 is going to be a repeat of 2012. So the question for this year becomes, Can our nation’s golf courses generate their own heat?

     Europe’s golf industry isn’t going to get back on its feet anytime soon. The numbers have been crunched, and during the fourth quarter of last year European economies shrank faster than they have at any time since 2009, during the darkest days of the global financial crisis. For the time being, at least, Germany and France have become tangled up in the slump, and the New York Times believes the worsening data is “raising anxieties of a longer, deeper recession.” If there’s a silver lining in this dark cloud, it’s that fiscal policies are finally coming under greater scrutiny. As hard times have gotten harder, even hard-core champions of budget-cutting appear to be having second thoughts. The Wall Street Journal, a fiscal hawk if there ever was one, believes that “the region's deepening malaise challenges European authorities’ insistence that fiscal austerity will lead to growth by boosting business confidence.” It’s entirely possible that austerity isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be.

     Turkey is drying up quickly, and that doesn’t bode well for its golf prospects. According to data compiled from satellite imagery, Turkey and three adjacent nations (Syria, Iraq, and Iran) lost a total of 117 million acre-feet of stored fresh water between 2003 and 2010 -- roughly as much water as is contained in the Dead Sea. “The Middle East just does not have that much water to begin with, and it’s a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change,” a researcher told Business Insider. That being said, it’s worth noting that Turkey still has plenty of coastline along the Black and Mediterranean seas that could presumably accommodate golf courses, even if they’re required to irrigate their fairways with water produced by desalination plants.

     Speaking of droughts, Toro is capitalizing on the fast-growing need to make water go farther. In the first quarter of this year, earnings at the Bloomington, Minnesota-based company exceeded expectations, in part because golf courses are suffering “in the wake of dry spells that required better water management techniques.” Toro’s sales are said to be “particularly robust” in Australia, a nation so dry of late that parts of it have literally been on fire. And, in a move that could serve to boost its bottom line in the future, Toro has purchased “a small Chinese micro-irrigation firm” that will help it enter what it calls a “critical growth market.”

     The connection between golf construction and residential development, once thought to be inviolable, continues to erode. The latest evidence comes from home builders eager to cash in on pent-up demand from aging baby boomers. According to their research, today’s seniors don’t want to live in “the huge retirement golf course developments of yesteryear” -- Sayonara, Sun City -- but in smaller suburban subdivisions. “The days of the mega master-planned community with four clubhouses and 27 golf courses are dead,” a real estate researcher told the Dallas Morning News. The recreational amenities favored today include walking trails, fitness centers, and swimming pools.

     For years, it’s been clear that health-minded people shouldn’t breathe the air in much of metropolitan China. Now, in up to 90 percent of the nation’s cities, they probably shouldn’t drink the water, either.