It’s complex but also really clever...not withstanding all the rain we're having in the desert.
Tens of thousands of golf fans, some of them sober and fully clothed, will flood the grounds of
TPC Scottsdale for a tournament known as “the greatest show on turf.”The
Waste Management Open is a spectacle, all right.
To watch it come together — the grandstands and pavilions, the dizzying logistics of seating and safety, foot traffic, food and beverage — is to marvel at the time and money involved.
What’s easy to forget is the event’s most vital input.
The greatest show on turf takes place on, well, turf, which depends on many things but on one thing more than any other.
None of this happens without water.
“It’s our most precious resource,” says Brandon Reese, director of golf course operations for TPC Scottsdale.
Where that resource comes from and how it is managed — in an arid region, in a time of drought — is itself a story of sophisticated planning that touches on many of the tangled issues surrounding
golf and water use in the West. In debates over those issues, golf’s critics and defenders tend to cast the industry in one of two ways: as an environmental blight that’s particularly egregious in the desert, or a robust economic engine that doesn’t get due credit for the sustainable strides that it has made.
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Josh Sens is the author of this article. Among other things he's a Golf Journalist,Senior writer with Golf Magazine; restaurant critic for San Francisco Magazine.
Co-author, with Sammy Hagar, of Are We Having Any Fun Yet?
https://golf.com/news/features/waste-management-open-water-turf-irrigation