A golf course superintendent sees Greg Norman’s contradiction instantly. His design brand sells “least disturbance,” but the LIV Golf league he ran grew desert turf on desalinated seawater, and the grounds crews pay now that the money is gone.
Greg Norman Golf Course Design opened in 1987 and today carries more than a hundred courses across thirty-four countries, all built on a philosophy the trade calls least disturbance: route the holes along the land that is already there, move as little dirt as the site allows, and plant grass that suits the local water instead of fighting it. Several of its courses earned Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification, the golf industry’s stamp for water conservation. Done right, that approach hands a superintendent the cheapest course he will ever maintain, a lower floor on water, fuel, fertilizer, and labor for the life of the property.
The LIV desert surfaces run the opposite way. Royal Greens, on the Red Sea coast, is grassed wall to wall in seashore paspalum so the club never has to overseed, but that cultivar is chosen precisely because the irrigation is desalinated seawater, and the two are locked together. Atlas Turf Arabia, a joint venture between Atlas Turf International and Golf Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, farms the region’s Platinum TE paspalum for projects like these. A course of roughly a hundred and fifty acres drinks near two hundred million gallons a year; in Saudi Arabia about seventy percent of drinking water is desalinated at close to a dollar per cubic meter, burning several times the energy of pumping groundwater, and the salt left behind forces even more water just to flush it. That is not least disturbance.