The Week That Was, august 21, 2011

china Ron Fream's “Garden” Party

Ron Fream's design company has hit the mother lode.

A Malaysian company has hired Santa Rosa, California-based Golfplan to design seven golf courses at Beijing Secret Garden, an emerging four-season resort in the snowy mountains of Hebei Province, China. When it's completed, Beijing Secret Garden will be able to accommodate 18,000 tourists a day -- many of them from Beijing, a three-hour drive to the southeast -- and its developed area alone will spread over nearly 5,000 acres.

Needless to say, if all the courses are built, Beijing Secret Garden will boast one of the largest golf complexes on earth, and one of the four or five largest in China.

“There are big plans for this property, obviously, and we're eager to get the golf portion of those plans underway,” said Kevin Ramsey, one of Golfplan's partners, in a press release.

Beijing Secret Garden is billing itself as the largest ski destination in Asia. It's been been modeled on one of North America's premier ski towns, Whistler in British Columbia, and like Whistler it'll have enough amenities and attractions to satisfy the desires of most any vacationer. In addition to what it promises will be a “world-class” ski area, it’ll someday have too many houses and condos to count, thousands of hotel rooms and other overnight accommodations, a lodge, meeting space, a theme park, an equestrian center, spas and wellness centers, sports academies, shopping areas, entertainment venues, and a winery.

The whole shebang is being developed by Lim Chee Wah, who attended the London School of Economics and is the president of a big, publicly traded Malaysia development firm, VXL Group of Companies. Lim is also a member of the family that owns Malaysia’s powerful, wealthy Genting Group, which operates dozens of casinos and resorts on several continents and has numerous assets (among them, Norwegian Cruise Lines) all over the planet, including the United States.

Fream and the Lims go way back. Twenty years ago, Golfplan designed the 18-hole golf course at Genting Group's first golf community, Awana Genting Highlands Golf & Country Resort in suburban Kuala Lumpur.

These days, Lim is also active on other golf fronts. He's hoping to develop the Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Golf Resort, which will occupy 467 acres in Svay Rieng, Cambodia and Tay Ninh, Vietnam, with nine holes of its golf course in each country.

Fream has been designing golf courses in China since 1984. His firm's website lists six completed 18-hole courses, along with a pair of nine-hole tracks. Its most recent work includes Grand Dynasty Golf Club in Beijing, Qiandaohu Country Club in Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province), and Weihai Point Golf Resort in Weihai (Shandong Province). The press release states that Golfplan is currently at work on five golf properties (153 total holes) in the nation.

In terms of construction, Golfplan's courses at Beijing Secret Garden will be far superior to its initial efforts in the People's Republic. Addressing a topic we've heard a lot about in recent months, David Dale of Golfplan said, The first golf courses built here in China were not built well. Golf was so new, it was very difficult to find or import construction expertise. It was equally difficult to match maintenance expertise with newly finished courses. Very few architects are happy with the way those early Chinese courses have fared over time, in terms of construction and maintenance. It's a sign of how immature the Chinese market was at that time.

VXL Group is currently laying the infrastructure at Beijing Secret Garden, and Golfplan expects to break ground on the first course early next year. Ramsey describes the property as “quite heroic, but also very peaceful.”

Incidentally, the number of skiers in China -– currently about 5 million -– is expected to grow to 20 million by 2020.

china Boiling Over Water

China's nascent golf industry has earned a reputation for building courses faster than anywhere else on the planet. But now some opponents of golf construction are pushing back, leveraging an issue of vital importance to any nation's economic security.

The issue is water.

“An increasing number of golf courses are draining our most precious resource, underground water,” reads an editorial in China Daily. “The rapid depleting of underground water to keep the hundreds of golf courses green will likely prove to have severe consequences for many cities in the near future.”

As has often been noted of late, 400 of the more than 600 major cities in China are suffering from increasingly acute water shortages. Beijing, for example, needs to bring in water from neighboring provinces to satisfy the needs of its burgeoning population.

When a nation is thirsty, it begins searching for taps it can turn off. And for now, at least, China's environmentalists are taking aim at golf courses, which they portray -- with justification, in some instances -- as water-guzzlers extraordinaire.

In recent months, China's newspapers have begun to note egregious examples of the lengths to which golf courses will go to keep their turf green and lush. The South China Morning Post, for example, reports that some 100 golf courses in Hebei Province are equipped with both official and unofficial sets of pumps, and that the latter are used “to exploit and steal underground water.”

A provincial official told China National Radio that these secret, illegal pumps have sucked up so much water that “it would take at least 10,000 years for [the resources] to recover.”

Based on such reports, is it any wonder that the Guangming Daily has reportedly called golf construction “a national disaster”?

China Daily's conclusion: “It is high time that the central government took resolute action to reduce the number of golf courses and punish those who give the green light to their construction and their use of groundwater.”

Of course, not everyone believes that criticism from such quarters will adversely affect golf development in the People's Republic.

Dan Washburn, a U.S. writer based in China, told the Toronto Globe & Mail, “The last couple years have been especially rife with announced crackdowns. But what's always the end result? More golf courses in China.”

True enough. But it's likely as well that future golf construction in China will be slower, accompanied by tighter regulations and added expenses. And none of those things are good for business.

china For Love or Money?

Other news reports emanating from across the Pacific lead me to ask this question: How much golf development in China has been a response to growing interest in the game, and how much has been merely the result of a cash-grab by government officials?

It may be impossible to untangle the two. But the Xinhua news service has weighed in on the topic, and its conclusion is this: “Local officials seeking profits from land sales are behind China's recent golf course boom.”

For the moment, let's take exception to that comment.

Without question, more people are playing golf in China than ever before, and sales of golf equipment are growing fast. On top of that, all kinds of anecdotal evidence suggests that golf is a game well-suited to the Chinese temperament and the lifestyle to which the nation's fast-growing middle class aspires. Add it all up, and it seems that golf has come to stay in China.

Now let's try to find some meat on Xinhua's bone.

Golf courses are being built at a furious pace in China, and we have no credible statistics about them -- the number of rounds they attract, the revenues they record, the profits they generate. It's entirely possible that the vast majority of China's golf courses are barely played, or that they serve effectively as loss leaders propped up (for the time being) by real estate sales. I have no way of knowing. China's courses don't post their balance sheets.

Moreover, it's entirely possible that some cash-strapped Chinese municipalities, in an effort to collect development fees, have approved projects that can't pencil out. In some ways, it makes sense. For every golf project they approve, local officials both raise money and increase property values in their communities. It's like killing two birds with one stone.

As you know, today China has close to 600 golf courses, the vast majority of which (430, by one count) have been built since the nation's central government banned golf construction in 2004.

How many of those courses were given a green light solely because they contributed to a municipality's bottom line? Or because a provincial executive wanted a prestige community built under his watch? Or simply because a corrupt official wanted to line his pockets?

Your guess is as good as mine. But maybe Xinhua knows something we don't.

talking points Nicklaus' Holey Trinity

Jack Nicklaus recently visited Wynstone Golf Club in suburban Chicago, which features a golf course that he designed roughly 20 years ago. (It's the only Nicklaus “signature” course in Illinois.) During his stay, a club member asked him what non-Nicklaus courses he admires most. His answer:

“To play: Pebble Beach. Place to play: Augusta. Design: Pinehurst.”