Another Missed Opportunity?

In recent years, the U.S. golf industry has been sending many of its finest assets abroad, in particular its designers and builders. Now it's become apparent that the industry is also sending its flawed business model -- the one that served as a foundation for all those failed, failing, or soon-to-fail golf properties we see from sea to shining sea.

And people are finally starting to talk about it. The latest comments have come from Michael Hurdzan, a Columbus, Ohio-based designer, who addressed the issue in a Sports Illustrated article called "The Gilded Age of Golf Course Design Is Dead."

"The danger I see," Hurdzan told John Garrity, "is that the developers and golf architects will go out and make the same mistakes in Asia that they made here in North America. They'll build mostly big resorts and private clubs. They won't make it a people's game."