Maybe it was never a great idea to build so many golf courses in the desert. But in the 1990s, when Tiger Woods mania was at its peak, Las Vegas went on a fairway construction spree, dotting the city with dozens of pristine, water-gobbling green oases, most woven around upscale master-planned suburbs.
One of those new fairways was the privately owned Badlands Golf Club, whose name now evokes huffs of frustration and wistful what-ifs from Las Vegans in the know. Opened in 1995 about 15 miles west of the Strip, the luxury course once wound its way around some of the city’s most opulent mansions and gated communities.
By the time Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant in 2009, the golf industry was in a crisis of its own. Many Americans had lost their appetite for the sport, which began hemorrhaging millions of players during the Great Recession and Woods’s fall from grace. Thousands of golf courses built during boom times shut down as a result — Badlands Golf Club among them…