worth reading The Only Architect You'll Ever Need

Attention, golf developers in the United States and around the world: If you need a celebrity architect to design your next golf course, think outside the box that's filled with names like Faldo, Montgomerie, Langer, and Sorenstam.

Instead, I urge you to consider Darius Oliver.

I know you've probably never heard of him. That's because his firm, Darius Oliver Golf Course Design, is new, small, and, well, Australian. And because it's never actually designed a single golf course.

But none of those things really matter, do they? Everyone has to start somewhere. Once upon a time, Paul Casey, Thomas Bjorn, Padraig Harrington, Darren Clarke, Ian Woosnam, Paul Lawrie, and K. J. Choi hadn't yet designed a golf course. That didn't stop them from entering the design business.

And, thank goodness, it's not going to stop Darius Oliver.

Besides, as much as any golf pro turned golf designer, Oliver knows exactly what qualities developers are looking for in an architect.

“Like Alister MacKenzie at Augusta National,” he writes in the press release announcing his company's creation, “Darius Oliver Golf Course Design works with the earth to harness the spirit of Old Tom Morris and the Old Course at St. Andrews to create timeless, sustainable golf masterpieces.”

Enticing, isn't it? Such noble ideals!

But don't pull out your checkbook just yet. You're being taken for a ride.

Darius Oliver is the architecture editor of Australian Golf Digest and a blogger at Planet Golf. His phony press release aims to spoof the self-aggrandizing announcements that golf pros make when they decide they need to leave a legacy. It's directed, he writes, “at golf clubs and developers who wish to build courses without genuine golf architects.”

Is that you, Bubba?

“With a recent spate of B-, C-, and even D-grade golf celebrities now offering so-called ‘design services,’ I figured it was time for me to also get in on the act and try to exploit my limited media profile for additional coin,” Oliver confesses.

Such refreshing honesty!

The way Oliver sees it, the places where golf is just now establishing a presence are especially fertile territories for celebrity designers. That's why, he says, he aims to secure commissions wherever “a disconnect exists between client ambition and architect ability.”

The good news for fledgling course “designers” like me is that in developing regions it apparently doesn’t matter if you can’t route a course, build a hole, float a green, or solve drainage problems. You don’t even need to understand the principles of true strategic design. If you have won important championships or (hopefully) written well-received golf articles, then you are more than qualified to advise and design.

So don't hesitate! Get in on the ground floor! Hire Darius Oliver today!