The Week That Was: October 25, 2010

montenegro Is Norman Number One?

Orascom Development Holding has begun to lay the infrastructure for the resort that's expected to be the home of Montenegro's first golf course.

The course will be the centerpiece of Lustica, a waterfront resort taking shape on 1,400 acres along the nation's rocky Adriatic coast. Orascom, operating through Podgorica-based Lustica Development AD, has master-planned the resort to include 750 villas, 1,600 condos, several hotels (2,200 total rooms), two marinas, meeting space, a village center, schools, a spa, a medical center, and other attractions.

Golf Course Architecture reports that the first phase of the project is scheduled to open at the end of 2013. Other sources say that the first phase will include a hotel, one marina, and an 18-hole golf course.

It appears to me that Greg Norman will design the golf course. Lustica's website includes the West Palm Beach, Florida-based designer as part of the development team, although it doesn't specifically name him as the course's designer. Norman doesn't list Lustica on his website, but he clearly doesn't object to his name being mentioned on Lustica's.

Orascom developed the famed El Gouna resort on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, where it’s building a second golf course, and it also plans to build a Kurt Rossknecht-designed course in Andermatt, Switzerland.

As I reported several months ago, a U.S. design firm has been hired to evaluate potential sites for golf courses in Montenegro and map out a golf development strategy. Dana Fry of Columbus, Ohio-based Hurdzan Fry Environmental Golf Design, who's helping to conduct the study, told GCA earlier this year, “I predict that five or more courses will be built in the country in the next five to ten years.”

australia Ross Perrett, On 'the Beach'

Tom Doak’s overlooked golf course in Australia is about to come off life support, as a new ownership group has stepped up to revive the links-style layout in St. Andrews Beach.

Most everybody is familiar with Barnbougle Dunes Golf Links in Bridport, Tasmania, which Doak co-designed with Michael Clayton and is ranked among the world’s top courses. But in the same year that Barnbougle Dunes opened, in 2004, Doak also opened the Gunnamatta track at St. Andrews Beach Golf Club, on a site that he’s said “may be the best piece of property I’ve ever had to work with.”

Although St. Andrews Beach was immediately ranked among Australia’s top 10 golf courses, the accompanying lots didn’t sell, nor did memberships into its private club. The property was eventually taken over by receivers, and it closed for several months beginning in 2008. It reopened as a daily-fee track, St. Andrews Beach Golf Course, in October 2009.

The property's new owner is a group led by Ross Perrett, one of the principals of South Melbourne-based Thomson Perrett Golf Course Architects. Perrett's partners, according to a press release, are a Melbourne-based accounting firm, the course's current managers (a company called Golf Services Management), and “a Chinese friend who has a passion for golf.”

Earlier this year the Age, a Melbourne-based newspaper, identified the “Chinese friend” as “an Asian developer” and put the sales price at $7 million.

For the money, the new owners got Doak’s course, 20 apartments, and what the club graciously calls a “rustic” clubhouse. More important, they acquired some adjacent property where they plan to build a second 18-hole course along with a 40-room hotel, 120 apartments or condos, a day spa, and a shopping area.

The new owners say they aim to turn St Andrews Beach into “one of Australia’s leading golf facilities.”

mongolia Golf in the Land of Genghis Khan

This week Golf Course Industry magazine checks in with a first-person account of building the first 18-hole, fully grassed golf course in Mongolia.

The course will be part of Sky Resort. The writer, Jim Connelly, is a certified agronomist who's been hired to grow its grass -- no mean feat in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, where wintertime temperatures can drop to 50 degrees below zero and summertime temperatures can rise to 100 degrees.

Despite those extremes, Connelly believes that golf has a future in Mongolia.

“Golf follows economic prosperity," he writes, “and Mongolia’s future looks bright due to the demand for energy, coal, and mineral exports to China and Russia.”

The nation, he says, is “changing from a very poor country into a developing nation that is attracting foreign business investments from Europe, Asia, and America, bringing business opportunity, building embassies, establishing English-language schools, and looking for recreation.”

Some of that recreation is coming to life at Sky Resort, whose golf course has been designed by Santa Rosa, California-based GolfPlan (Ron Fream's company). The resort's ski area opened this year, and a hotel, a spa, and other attractions will follow.

Sky Resort is being developed by MCS Group, a Mongolian conglomerate whose subsidiaries include Genghis Khan Beer.

Connelly's seeding began this year and will conclude next spring.

More Good Press for Golf

While recovering from recent shoulder surgery, Greg Norman didn't play any golf for almost a year. And he didn't miss the game in the least.

“I didn't touch a golf club for 11 months,” Norman told the Palm Beach Post, “and quite honestly, I actually really enjoyed it.”


It gets worse.

“There was a part of my day that I always used to allocate for golf, like five, six, seven, eight hours a day,” Norman continued. “So I had a lot more time on my hands, and I enjoyed life a heck of a lot more.”

Okay, I understand that Norman loves golf. I'm sure he'd readily admit that golf has meant everything to him. And maybe his statement was taken slightly out of context.

Still, comments like the ones he gave the Post aren't the kind of press that golf needs these days. When a sport is losing players left and right, it's doesn't need one of its superstars suggesting that he can live just fine without it.