News & Notes from the USA #3

. . . Reynolds Plantation has as nice a collection of golf courses as you'll find anywhere, and now we're learning what they're truly worth: $43.1 million or less, depending on how the final price is calculated. Later this month, the 3,500 property owners at Reynolds Plantation will likely agree to buy the community's six golf courses -- including tracks designed by Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus, and Rees Jones -- thereby bailing out their financially troubled developer, an entity controlled by Mercer Reynolds. Unfortunately, the courses aren't worth the price listed on the offer sheet. They were built as loss leaders, and they remain so to this day. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution so delicately notes, they “are not run to turn a profit but to sell lots and lifestyle in the community.” For that reason, Reynolds has agreed to provide the property owners with some financial relief, in the form of $21.5 million that will be paid in installments through 2017 to cover the courses' losses. In other words, the sales price is a little bit of a mirage, like so much else at the tony resort community on Georgia's Lake Oconee.

. . . Golf development may still be down and out, but it appears that things are looking up for golf's “big-box” retailers. The South Florida Business Journal reports that the Golfsmith chain has posted its best sales quarter in five years, thanks in part to pent-up demand. “Golfers are starting to spend money again,” said Golfsmith's marketing director. Edwin Watts didn't share any sales figures, but it opened 21 stores in 2010 and plans to open four more this month. “The strength of our business tells me we are climbing out of this recession,” said the company's CEO. Of course, the Big Boys are building their market share by squeezing the nation's mom-and-pop stores out of existence, but that didn't stop the Business Journal from declaring that the golf industry “is getting back on course.”

. . . Update from the Mecca of Minimalism: The 12-hole, par-3 track coming out of the sand at the Bandon Dunes resort in Oregon has grown a bit. “We've found a 13th hole,” Ben Crenshaw said in a story issued by Cybergolf. The odd number doesn't phase Mike Keiser, the resort's developer, who's defied convention numerous times in the past and will most certainly continue to do so. The course, likely to be called Bandon Preserve, is scheduled to open in the summer of 2012. Bill Coore, Crenshaw's design partner, calls it “real golf on a smaller scale.”

. . . When did golf, a game originally played along the ground, evolve into a game played mostly in the air? And can military metaphors help explain the evolution? Just ask Robert


Trent Jones, Jr., who was inspired to draw this comparison during a conversation with a reporter from the Buffalo News: The ground game was the original game. I like to say it's the difference between World War I and World War II. World War I was in the trenches and on the ground. World War II was the Luftwaffe and the American and British air forces bombing. The aerial game is post-World War II. That was kind of what my father popularized.