The Week That Was: January 30, 2011

scotland Two Americans Get the Scottish Open

This year's Scottish Open will be played at Castle Stuart Golf Links outside Inverness, on Scotland’s Moray Firth. The course was designed by two Americans, Mark Parsinen and Gil Hanse, and opened to great acclaim in 2009.

The event will take place in July, the week before the British Open.

Castle Stuart is Parsinen's second golf course in Scotland, and he's already got a site picked out for his third.

His first course was Kingsbarns, near St. Andrews, a co-design with Kyle Phillips, an architect based in Granite Bay, California. One critic said Kingsbarns, which opened a decade ago, “appears so natural that you would think that it had been there for years” and “deserves to be bracketed alongside the greatest courses in the world.”

Parsinen aimed to do something even better in Inverness, on a 425-acre parcel that he once said was “the best site I’ve ever seen,” and he succeeded. Castle Stuart has been hailed as “a golfing masterpiece” that “captivates the mind and tests every element in your golfing armoury.” Golf magazine named the 7,009-yard track the “best new international golf course” for 2009, and Ron Whitten of Golf Digest recently said it “might be the most perfectly conceived and executed design ever built.”

Parsinen makes no bones about his goals for Castle Stuart. “We want the Open championship to come here,” he said in an interview with Golf Course Architecture in 2009.

My guess is that the Scottish Open will serve as a tune-up for the bigger event.

Parsinen's next golf course, to take shape on a site adjacent to Castle Stuart's existing track, will probably also be designed by Hanse, who’s based in Malvern, Pennsylvania. But don’t expect it to be built anytime soon. It took Parsinen six years to build the first course at Castle Stuart, and he’s not in any hurry to build the second.

In recent years, the Scottish Open -- officially known as Barclays Scottish Open -- has been played at Loch Lomond Golf Club, which had been owned by another American, Lyle Anderson. Anderson lost Loch Lomond when he defaulted on some loans, and a members' group acquired the club earlier this month.

canada Desperately Seeking Managers

Nova Scotia wants to sell or lease three resorts, including one with a Stanley Thompson-designed golf course.

The course is the featured attraction of Digby Pines Golf Resort & Spa in Digby, a town along the Bay of Fundy. It's a 6,284-yard, parkland-style track that opened in the late 1920s.

The province is also itching to unload Liscombe Lodge Resort & Conference Centre in Liscombe Mills and Keltic Lodge Resort & Spa in Cape Breton.

“We believe these are iconic properties and have buckets of potential,” one of the province's tourism officials told CBC News.

The province has focused on the resorts' potential because they aren't currently making any money. What's more, the company currently managing them, Connecticut-based New Castle Hotels & Resort, believes that they could use $11 million worth of improvements.

Incidentally, Keltic Lodge is located on property adjacent to another Thompson-designed track, the highly regarded Highland Links Golf Course. Golf Canada recently described the course, located in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, as “a Canadian treasure,” though it appears that the treasure has been looted. The track has been damaged by recent floods and may not open as scheduled in the spring.

Parks Canada, the owner of Highland Links, is currently trying to scrounge up the money needed to repair the course. It's possible that the agency could also spring for at least some of the upgrades called for in a renovation plan created by Ian Andrew, a Brantford, Ontario-based architect, in 2008. The course was last renovated in the late 1990s.

Roughly speaking, Thompson is to Canadian golf architecture what Robert Trent Jones is to U.S. golf architecture. He co-founded (with Donald Ross) the American Society of Golf Course Architects and designed more than 140 courses in Canada, as well as others in the United States and elsewhere. Andrew believes that he's one of the 10 greatest golf designers in history.

“We all look at him as the bar,” says Andrew. “He's the level we have to deliver at if we want to make a statement.”

Thompson has designed two other courses that are located in national parks, both in Alberta: Banff Springs Hotel Golf Course in Banff and Jasper Park Golf Course in Jasper.

india Still Looking in Goa, Part Two

After coming up empty the first time around, state officials have renewed their efforts to find someone who'll build a golf course in Goa.

The state's tourism department is seeking expressions of interest from a developer willing to establish “a PGA-standard golf course and allied tourism activities at one place, either individually or as a consortium.”

Late last year, it appeared that Goa had found a developer, as its tourism minister reported that three parties had responded to the original EOI and that the golf course would be built in Pernem, a town of the northern part of the state.

Perhaps the terms were too onerous. The revised EOI states that the prospective developer must provide the site (a minimum of 200 acres), have at least 25 years' worth of experience in the hospitality business, and have in place “a reputed international hospitality brand” to manage the facility. In addition, the ideal candidate is someone who's already operating a golf course somewhere.

Goa currently has just one 18-hole course, a K. D. Bagga-designed layout at the Intercontinental resort in Canacona. The state's goal is to “attract high-spending tourists,” particularly golf-crazy Japanese tourists, and it believes another golf course would help do it.