The Week That Was july 3, 2011

vietnam Fly Me to the Green

By mid 2013, the international airport in Vietnam’s largest city is expected to sprout a pair of 18-hole golf courses.

Long Bien Investment JSC intends to build the courses at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, which spreads over roughly 2,000 acres just north of Ho Chi Minh City. The airport is operating at capacity -– it reportedly handled 15.5 million passengers last year, more than half of Vietnam’s air traffic -– and will soon be replaced with a bigger, better airport. When the new airport opens, Tan Son Nhat will focus on domestic flights.

Long Bien, which has secured a lease on roughly 375 acres at Tan Son Nhat, also plans to build 54 villas, 1,000 apartments, a hotel, a lake, restaurants, some schools, and other attractions. The golf complex will include a range and a clubhouse.

Tran Van Tinh, Long Bien’s deputy chairman, told a local newspaper that the project will add “more green areas to the city” and “meet the needs of international tourists and foreign firms in Vietnam.”

The project is good to go. It was approved in 2007, by the People’s Committee of the city’s Tan Binh District.

I should note that the operator of Tan Son Nhat, Ho Chi Minh City-based Southern Airports Corporation, expects to open the replacement airport by 2015. The new facility, Long Thanh International Airport, will spread over 12,500 acres and include hotels, a duty-free shopping area, entertainment venues, office space, warehouses, and an 18-hole golf course.

asia The Next Number One

Andrew Georgiou has had his Jon Landau moment. He's seen the future of golf, and its name is Asia.

“I believe in 10 years we're going to have 20-plus $5 to $6 million tournaments in this market,” contends Georgiou, the CEO of the Singapore-based World Sport Group. “It's just a function of time and the growth in those markets. It will make it bigger than the European Tour. I think it's probably another five to 10 years after that before it becomes bigger than the U.S. PGA Tour.”

Of course, Georgiou is biased. World Sport Group is Asia's largest sports marketing firm, a sort of miniature IMG. It produces and distributes programming and manages events in all of Asia's favorite sports, including soccer, cricket, basketball, and, yes, golf. So it stands to reason that anything that promotes the growth of golf in Asia is good for his business.

But let us not forget that wealth begets power, and that golf in Asia is getting richer by the minute. Or that Georgiou's words have been echoed by many others in recent years. A decade ago, Asia was just a blip on the screen of golf. Now the continent has a growing number of tournament champions, lots of high-profile professional events, and course development on a grand scale. It's on the move.

“There's no doubt in my mind that Asian golf will be bigger, more valuable, more affluent than the U.S. PGA Tour over time,” Georgiou believes. “It's just a question of when.”

united states Don Herfort, RIP

Don Herfort, the only Minnesota-based designer in the American Society of Golf Course Architects, died on June 26. He was 86.

Herfort established Don Herfort, Inc. in the Twin Cities in the 1960s, and he later joined Kevin Norby to create Herfort Norby Golf Course Architects. He's probably best known for his courses in and around St. Paul, a group that includes Dellwood Hills Golf Club in Dellwood, Indian Hills Golf Club in Stillwater, the 18-hole course at Oak Glen Golf Club in Stillwater, and River Oaks Golf Course in Cottage Grove.

“He wanted golf to be fun and wanted to make sure that his client's investment was financially sound,” Norby told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.


Herfort had no formal training as a golf course architect. He earned a degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin and went to work at 3M as an accountant. During his time at 3M, the company hatched a plan to build a golf course for its employees. One day Herfort took a look at the drawings for the proposed course and didn't much like what he saw.

“I didn't think the guy they had hired to build the course knew what he was doing,” Herfort recalled in a 2008 interview with Minnesota Golfer. “The holes weren't laid out very well. The drainage was going to be a problem with the layout. It was like the whole thing was wrong. So I said so.”

3M eventually turned over the design work to Herfort, who created what is now Tartan Park Golf Course in Lake Elmo.

That was the start of Herfort's career as a golf course architect. Over the next 40 years, he was involved in the design or redesign of roughly 140 courses in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The Star Tribune described him as “Minnesota's most prolific golf course architect.”

“Every day, there are thousands of people who play on his courses,” one of Herfort's daughters told the newspaper. “That's a pretty great legacy.”