The Greening of Golf

3 Waging a war on pests: golf comes to America Having established our theoretical foundation, we begin this chapter in the early 1900s, at a time not long after golf had migrated to North America from the other side of the Atlantic. Golf’s official history in North America begins in 1873 with the foundation of the Royal Montreal Golf Club in Montreal, Canada (The Royal Montreal Golf Club, 2011). Fifteen years later, the first American course was formed in Yonkers, New York (see PGA.com, 2013). The journey from Europe to Canada and the United States was surely not the first moment at which golf spiralled together with the forces of globalization. The Royal Calcutta Golf Club, for example, still considers itself “the home of golf in India”, having been founded in 1829 and conferred the title ‘Royal’ at the start of the next century (The Royal Calcutta Golf Club., n.d.). But our analysis in this chapter begins from the premise that golf’s journey to North America, and especially the United States, is particularly important when considering the game’s overall history – and its environmental impact. Although golf’s origins are contested, Scotland is commonly presumed to be the birthplace of the game. Scotland is, if nothing else, the site of one of golf’s more famous stories: King James II’s attempt to ban golf on the grounds that it was distracting the masses from their archery practice (British Golf Museum, n.d.). This was an injunction destined to fail. In 1552, as Campbell 2002( ) recounts, “the citizens of the town of St Andrews [Scotland] were given, by charter right, the use of the links for ‘golf, futball, shuteing at all times with other manners of pastime’ ” (Campbell, 2002: 15). St Andrews Links remains one of the most famous courses in the world; it brands itself as ‘the home of golf’ to this day (St Andrews Links, n.d.). What is important to both our examination of golf in this chapter and to our claim that golf’s voyage to North America has relevance to (current) thinking about environmental issues is the form that golf courses took before the sport arrived on North American shores. On this matter, Campbell’s reflections on golf’s foundational years in Scotland are instructive once again: Brad Millington and Brian Wilson - 9781526107039 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 09:51:05PM via free access 52 Part II: Background and history The first golf courses were rudimentary indeed and very far from being anything like the courses of present day. There were no greens or tees as such and the hole was a crude affair cut roughly with a knife. It served not only as the ultimate resting place for the ball but as a supply of sand for teeing the ball for the next drive. (Campbell, 2002: 15) The golf course was a mixed use terrain – a site, for example, for sheep grazing in addition to golf. So varied were the uses of golf course landscapes that golfers wore red coats to warn others than a golf ball might be headed in their direction (Golf Canada, n.d.). This is not to say, of course, that there was no human modification of natural landscapes before golf arrived in North America. As Bale (1994) writes, golf spread through Scotland and England in the 1800s to the extent that “one obser- ver noted that the resulting landscapes had no relationship with nature” (Bale, 1994: 54; cf., Lowerson, 1993: 134). Rather, it is to say that the game of golf, from its foundations to the twentieth century, was to a great extent subject to the natural whims of the land upon which it was played. We shall see how in later years this power dynamic was effectively reversed. This review of golf’s early history sets the stage for our main argument in this chapter – an argument that re-emerges in different forms throughout this book. The argument is this: to explain the emergence of chemical-intensive ‘pro-golf’, which reached a high point in the 1970s (the point where this chapter ends), it is crucial to examine how broader processes associated with modernization have impacted the sport. Specifically, and based mainly on our review of industry trade publications, we contend that golf’s dominant storyline across the first three quarters of the 1900s in North America is one of modernization – that is, of finding ways to transcend an allegedly ‘primitive’ past, primarily through investment in science and technology. In this sense, golf came to reflect Latour’s synopsis of the traditional view of what it means to be modern: The adjective ‘modern’ designates a new regime, an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time. When the word ‘modern’, ‘modernization’, or ‘modernity’ appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past. Furthermore, the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers, Ancients and Moderns. (Latour, 1993: 10) In practical terms, what this means is that golf industry representatives were con- stantly on the lookout for devices that could ‘tame’ the golf course landscape and help wage ‘battle’ against unwanted ‘pests’. With the arrival of the post-war years, superintendents, course developers, and other key figures in the golf industry Brad Millington and Brian Wilson - 9781526107039 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 09:51:05PM via free access Waging a war on pests 53 could mark out distance from their industry forbears most of all by adopting highly potent synthetic pesticides. At this point in time, as we shall see, these same stakeholders in golf were entering a political landscape rife with critiques of modernization. Modern warfare: golf in the early 1900s In recounting golf’s historical development, renowned golf architect Michael Hurdzan (1994) starts from the same point that we did above. “In the time of Old Tom Morris (mid-1800s to early 1900s),” he writes, “golf courses were laid out on the land with little or no modification to the ground except the clearing of brush or trees and seeding turfgrasses.” Old Tom Morris was famous first as a golfer in the mid-1800s, though he is remembered in the golf industry as much for his contributions as a greenkeeper at the aforementioned St Andrew’s Links course as he is for his playing accomplishments. Hurdzan continues: “Similarly, golf course maintenance was simple, requiring only that the greenkeeper occa- sionally mow the grass, topdress liberally, fertilize sparingly with natural fer- tilizer sources, and resod as needed. Golf had virtually no impact on the land” (Hurdzan, 1994: 191). The story was not all that different, Hurdzan suggests, from the early 1900s to the middle of the century. ‘Crude’ earthmoving equip- ment was adopted to help better shape the land; course maintenance became slightly more sophisticated, “but still relied heavily on mowing, topdressing, and natural chemicals” (Hurdzan, 1994: 189). Golf’s environmental impacts were still muted – at least relative to later times. Hurdzan’s reflections are instructive, both for their historical perceptiveness and their implicit acknowledgement (which Hurdzan later renders explicit) that golf would eventually have much more significant environmental impacts. But the US publication The Golf Course – a regularly issued bulletin for discussing golf course construction and upkeep – suggests that golf course development and maintenance could be challenging even in the early 1900s, and that golf industry professionals at times saw themselves as breaking away from a pre- ceding era. Indeed, The Golf Course has been described as a publication that hoped “to fill a growing technical information need” for key golf stakeholders (Turfgrass Information File, n.d.a). It was important in the sense in that it pre- dated the release of other influential publications (e.g. the Bulletin of the Green Section of the US Golf Association) and in that it provided a venue for discussing ‘modern’ construction- and maintenance-related practices. Brad Millington and Brian Wilson - 9781526107039 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 09:51:05PM via free access 54 Part II: Background and history The modernist sensibilities that informed The Golf Course were signalled in volume one, issue one of this publication. Readers of the bulletin could prepare themselves, the publishers wrote, for authoritative prescriptions from leading industry professionals. This much was needed as golf continued to evolve: In every section of the country new courses are being built and old courses reconstructed along scientific lines, which received but scant consideration about five years ago. Nowadays turf is produced and maintained to such a high degree of excellence that the early efforts are made to appear amateurish by com- parison. Golfers everywhere are critical and fastidious, and no longer are they content with the primitive courses of early days. (Anon., 1916a: 2) The Golf Course, then, set out to “present tested excellence in everything” (Anon., 1916a: 2). Subsequent issues would not fail in taking up this modernist theme. Most notable in this regard was the series termed ‘Modern Golf Chats’, penned by the well-regarded course architect A. W. Tillinghast. In one instalment of this series, Tillinghast wrote that early US golf courses – “with their featureless greens, mathematically correct and symmetrical bunkers and the ridiculous little bandbox teeing grounds” – had become a thing of the past. “The golf courses which we Americans are constructing to-day are very different, and so carefully are they built, after a thoughtful preparation of plans, that some of our produc- tions are not surpassed even in the old home of golf” (Tillinghast, 1916a: 1).

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