The Week That Was: May 29, 2011

australia Gary Player, Job-Hunter

Attention, developers in Australia: The “Black Knight” is looking for work.

This week, Gary Player officially joined the more than 200 U.S. golf architects, plus an equal number from around the world, who wish they could design a golf course Down Under.

“I have always wanted to design a course in Australia,” Player said in a press release published by Australian Senior Golfer and other “news” outlets. “I have been visiting and playing in Australia for nearly 60 years and absolutely love it. The people are fantastic, the land is incredibly diverse and I can’t wait to find a great project.”

What makes Player's quest different is that he's hired a local representative to dig up some work for him, as Jack Nicklaus has done in India.

Player's rep is Mike Orloff, who operates Golf Industry Central, a website that posts news, lists jobs, and promotes his management and marketing services. Orloff has worked for American Golf Corporation and ClubCorp, and he provides “operational advice for new and existing golfing facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia in the areas of staff recruitment, membership attainment, membership retention, retail management, new player development, event management, and revenue-generation strategies.”

With so many talents, I'm surprised that he has time to take on additional work.

All kidding aside, it's curious that Player hasn't yet designed any courses in Australia, even if it is the world's smallest continent. For the record, he hasn't designed any in South America, either.

vietnam The More the Merrier

In an effort to feed a demand for golf that may never materialize, government officials are thinking about increasing the number of golf courses that can be built in Vietnam.

According to a report from a Vietnamese news service, Vietnam currently has 24 operating golf properties and 25 others under construction. The government has capped the number at 85 or 90, depending on which source you believe, which means that the nation is more than halfway to a goal it isn't supposed to reach for another decade.

So, before the courses in the pipeline are even close to being absorbed, growth-minded interests are petitioning the government to super-size the nation's development plan. Here's a quick breakdown of the three alternative proposals that have been offered by the nation's ministry of planning and investment:

Plan One maintains the same number of courses that the government approved in 2009, except that it substitutes five new projects for five that have flat-lined.

Plan Two boosts the number of courses to 96, presumably with allowances for dead projects.

Plan Three adds roughly 30 courses to the number already approved, increasing the nation's inventory of golf properties to around 120 by 2020.

Needless to say, the ministry favors Plan Three.

Its argument: With 120 courses, Vietnam would be on par with nations that it competes against for tourism dollars, namely Thailand (256 courses), Malaysia (230), Indonesia (152), and the Philippines (100). What's more, the ministers say, officials in tourist-friendly provinces -- among them, Thanh Hoa, Thai Nguyen, Dak Lak, and Quang Ninh -- are being besieged by development groups eager to build golf courses.

What's important to remember, of course, is that Vietnam has only about 5,000 home-grown golfers. If developers wish to build high-priced golf courses in the nation's emerging tourist traps, I sure hope they also have a plan that's guaranteed to bring world travelers to them.

worth reading Feeling the Earth Move

John Fought, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based golf architect, has opinions about his contemporaries and wasn't reluctant to share them with Tony Dear, a British writer who posts at The Bellingham Golfer.

Fought likes Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw best, Dear wrote in a recent profile, and believes that Keith Foster is highly underrated and John Harbottle deserves more recognition. He also likes a lot of what Tom Doak and David McLay Kidd are doing, but says the contours of their greens are sometimes a little over the top.

Fought has designed some well-regarded courses, among them Sand Hollow Golf Club in Hurricane, Utah (the state's top-rated course), Washington National Golf Club in suburban Seattle, Washington, and Big Sky Golf & Country Club in Pemberton, British Columbia.

He contends that the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s -- a time when course designers spent too much money and moved too much earth -- will be remembered, in Dear's words, as “the worst period in the history of golf course architecture.”

It was unbelievable how much dirt designers felt compelled to move, Fought told Dear. They'd basically design the holes back in their office, then come out to the site, where they would move however much earth it took to build their holes.

In fact, Fought believes, some of the biggest names in the business are still moving too much dirt.

There are still some huge land-movers out there -- Rees Jones, Tom Fazio and Jack Nicklaus, to name three. I looked at the site for the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain courses in Marana, Arizona. I thought it had just the right amount of movement and undulation to make a fun and interesting course. But when Jack came in, he said the place was basically too flat to make a good course and said he'd have to move a lot of earth. The hotel management wanted Jack to use my plans, but you can't tell Jack what to do.

Fought is also disappointed by the design changes that have been made at Augusta National Golf Club in recent years -- modifications that he says have “sterilized” the storied course.

Augusta National is very important, and I love everything about the Masters. But I just wish the course was a bit more authentic, a bit more [Alister] MacKenzie. People don't realize how much Robert Trent Jones is in there. And now there's a lot of Tom Fazio, too. . . .

I understand why the club lengthened the course. They had to. But it would look so cool if a few of the edges were allowed to grow a little rougher.