The Week That Was: May 15, 2011

australia Horton Hears a Who?

The battle over the future of Horton Park Golf Club keeps getting more and more complicated.

Earlier this year, Horton Park's members voted to sell their 132-acre property in Maroochydore, Queensland to the Sunshine Coast Council. The price: $39 million. The catch: The club must vacate by the end of August.

So the club needs a new home. Since its members have already rejected -- three times -- a chance to relocate to Twin Waters Golf Club in nearby Mudjimba Beach, it appears that a new course is its preference.

In recent months, Horton Park's members have evaluated several potential sites. At first it appeared that they were leaning toward property controlled by Andrew Gillman, who's offered to build an 18-hole, Graham Marsh-designed course for the new Horton Park Golf Club. Then, a month or so ago, Geoff Ogilvy, the popular Australian golf pro, purchased full-page newspaper ads encouraging the club to build its course -- presumably to be designed by Ogilvy and his design partner, Michael Clayton -- on what's been described as “a tremendous piece of land” in the town of Diddillibah.

Of course, two is merely company. So perhaps it was inevitable that a third option would be put on the table.

Last week, Greg Norman -- a hero in Australia, with parents who still live on the Sunshine Coast -- evaluated yet another potential home for Horton Park. His conclusion: The property could yield a ready-to-play, Greg Norman “signature” course just 14 months after the first shovel goes into the ground.

My question: Will the third designer be the charmer?

china The Shanghai Express

Robert Trent Jones, Jr., the Palo Alto, California-based course architect, has reportedly designed seven golf courses in China and has at least three others in the works.

What's more interesting, though, is how Jones landed his first commission in the People's Republic -- the one to design Shanghai Golf & Country Club -- back in the early 1980s. The club may now be “a playground for China's nouveau riche and even its Communist party officials,” as the Silicon Valley Mercury News puts it, but back then golf was widely feared and loathed. To build a golf course, strings had to be pulled by people at the very top of the Chinese government.

And then, to complete the job, an army of workers had to be assembled.

Jones, who's worked corridors of power for decades, recently told the story to the newspaper. Here it is:

Jones' foray into the rough of China's golf industry began in the early 1980s at the behest of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who was introduced to Jones by President Jimmy Carter during Deng's 1979 visit to the United States. Shanghai, now considered the Manhattan of China, then was a city “of mostly a lot of bicycles and no high-rises -- zero,” Jones recalled.

He met in a darkened office with a Communist official wearing a Mao suit and smoking cigarettes. The course designer, who knows his way around sand traps, found himself thrust in the middle of golf diplomacy. Prescott Bush, the late brother of former President George H. W. Bush, helped negotiate the complex deal.

“At the time, the government thought it was a political project because we had to improve our relations with the United States,” said Ma Jia Wei, vice general manager of the Shanghai golf club, who worked as a translator during the construction of the course. “There was little foreign investment in Shanghai and no entertainment, no karaoke, no sports.”

Jones said he was told he also played a role in the “punishment” of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao who was arrested on charges of treason for her role as a leader in the brutal Cultural Revolution. From her imprisonment in Shanghai, she inveighed against the destruction of a park west of downtown -- the site of the golf course -- by “occidentals” bringing “that capitalist sport” to China, Jones said.

Government officials, he added, “were ecstatic we caused her psychological pain. It was, `Thank you for applying one of the thousand cuts that is her punishment for what she did with the Gang of Four,'” he said, referring to the political faction charged with treasonous crimes in the wake of the revolution.

Construction on the Shanghai club began just after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, which led to an economic boycott by Western nations and a dearth of bulldozers to shape the course. So an army of workers with bamboo poles and giant dirt bags did the labor normally done by machines.

“It is the only hand-built golf course I have been involved in,” said Jones, 77. “There were 2,000 people camped out on that site in tents. They worked 24/7. It was very intense.”

egypt Democracy in Action

You say you want a revolution? Well, they had one in Egypt, and the result wasn’t good for golf development and construction, at least in the short term.

“My impression is that all my clients have taken a step back and are waiting to see what's going to happen,” John Sanford said in a recent interview with TCPalm.com.

Sanford, a golf course architect based in Jupiter, Florida, has designed a handful of courses in Egypt and has a new one under construction at Hacienda Bay, a deluxe resort community emerging on the Mediterranean coast near El Alamein. The 18-hole track was more than half-completed in January, when the government toppled, and before you could sing “we all want to change the world,” Palm Hills Development Group put Hacienda Bay on indefinite hiatus.

But last month, Sanford got some welcome news. Palm Hills says it’s ready to resume construction and has asked him to make a site visit this summer.

If there’s a lesson in the experience, it’s this: The spread of democracy is messy and usually involves hard choices.

“I support the people in their effort,” Sanford told the newspaper, “even though it is detrimental to my business.”