the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people actually benefit from all that water.

a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.

or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.

which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.

A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.

ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.

Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.