The Golf-Course Architect: Mike Hurdzan

Golf can sometimes have a positive impact -- on degraded land, for instance.
Very positive. Right now we're doing a little project on a landfill right at the end of the airport runway [in Columbus]. When you came in today, you flew right over it. It was an abandoned landfill. We're going to cap the landfill and put a golf facility on it. It's going to be a big driving range, a nine-hole par-3 course and a pitch-and-putt. We're building this facility on a piece of ground that couldn't have any other use for the next 40, 60, 80 years. All it would have done is to grow weeds and be a dumping ground for junk. It would have become an eyesore. Now it's going to become the central focus for the recreation of that community. We can do that also with floodplain lands that have previously been used for farming, industrial sites that have had a lot of petroleum products put onto the ground, old mines or quarries.

Do you think the pesticides used on golf courses today are safe?
I do. They've got to be properly used. It's a very fine line between a medicine and a poison -- we're trying to walk that line, to treat a pesticide as a medicine to get rid of these pests that are causing us a problem, but if we abuse them, then they can be poisons. The proper use of pesticides presents no problems at all. I started as a greenkeeper in 1957, at Beacon Light, a little golf course where I grew up. My dad was a teaching pro. Back in the mid-'50s we were using cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury; we were using all these heavy metals. We were using farm-grade fertilizers. Well, those things are gone. We didn't know any better back then. Science has showed us a better way to do things. When I went to school, Ohio State, Rachel Carson had just written Silent Spring, and that started me thinking.[Note: Silent Spring, published in 1962, documented the effect of pesticides on the environment, especially birds. It was one of the most powerful books of the 20th century and is widely credited with kick-starting the environmental movement in America.] And then I went to the University of Vermont, which was even more environmentally oriented. So when I started in golf architecture in the early '70s, I was like, why don't we try to do this in a more eco-friendly way? And honestly, no one cared until the 1990s. It was the environmentalists in the 1990s who really woke us up and said, come on, guys, you've got to do better. So we started to do it better. They deserve a lot of credit.

There's a great shortage of clean water, worldwide. There are droughts in Australia, Spain and here in the United States in Georgia, South Florida, Alabama, the Southwest. How do you reconcile that with the massive amounts of water golf courses use for irrigation?
Back in the '50s we had much less sophisticated irrigation. Then in the '70s and '80s we started putting automatic irrigation systems in, which had the capacity to deliver a lot of water, and so we really started to overwater and waste water. What's happened now is that the technology in irrigation has improved. We can irrigate a bigger area with less water. At Scioto, we have sensors in the soil that measure the moisture, temperature and salinity at the four-inch level and the eight-inch level. That information feeds back to a computer, and at any given time the superintendent can pull up those readings and base his irrigation on them rather than simply guessing. It's important to choose a grass that's well-adapted to that site. There are new, high-tech grasses that require less water. We can use treated gray water or effluent water that isn't fit for human consumption, rather than freshwater. But probably less than 20 percent of the golf courses in the United States are doing that. There's a lot of room for improvement. We need to find ways to more judiciously use our water, to do more with less. We don't need to maintain all of the golf course to the same extent. We need to change the perception that golf must be played on green grass. When that grass goes brown it's not dead, it's dormant. It's a natural cycle -- there are times of the year when the grass is going to be green, and other times when it's going to be brown, and if we allow that to happen, we won't need to use as much water. If there's some brown grass, it's not so bad; it's still a fun game. Nowhere does it say in the rules that golf has to be played on green grass.

What about the practice of overseeding in winter in the South? Is it necessary?
No. That's a prime example of changing golfers' attitudes. If people went to play golf in the South in the winter and found dormant Bermuda or zoysia or paspalum instead of green grass, it's a perfectly good playing surface. You need to irrigate the greens, yes, but that's a small amount of water. So I think overseeding is going away.