The Week That Was, september 11, 2011

asia Random News & Notes

Here are some development-related factoids, as provided by an Asian news service affiliated with the Wall Street Journal. Some of you will consider this old news, but I think it's worth repeating.

-- China now has close to 600 courses, all of them built since 1984, and about 1.3 million golfers. The People’s Republic aims to increase the number of golfers “to 30 million in the next 20 years,” notes Mario Rodrigues of LiveMint.com, and “the country will need to develop 2,000 courses over the next eight years” to do so.

-- In a story distributed by the Xinhua news service, the Forward Chinese Amateur Tour says that China had 490 18-hole courses at the end of 2010, including 97 in Guangdong Province, 51 in Shandong Province, and 70 in and around Beijing. Xinhua did some math and determined that the number of courses in China has tripled since 2004, from 170 to more than 570 today -– a stunning achievement, considering that a ban on golf construction has been in place in the People’s Republic since 2004. Xinhua helpfully points out that “only 10” of the new courses “were approved by the government and given business licenses, which implies that most of China’s golf courses were illegally built.”

-- Finally, let’s not ignore some dark clouds that may be gathering on the development horizon in Asia. Rodrigues says that Thailand and Malaysia, which have grown markedly as golf destinations over the past two decades, “are now facing their own issues of oversupply -– more courses than golfers.”

china Site-Seeing in the People's Republic

Have all the best sites for golf courses in China already been exhausted?

In a nation as large as China, it hardly seems possible. But over the past year or so, a growing number of U.S. architects have issued complaints about the quality of the properties they're expected to build courses upon.

“There are still some good sites there,” one of them recently told me, “but they're few and far between.”

I'm not going to reveal any identities or pinpoint any places. Suffice to say that in the past few weeks alone I've spoken with two architects -- one who lives east of the Mississippi and one who lives west of it -- who are finding it increasingly difficult to do their best work in China.

The problem: As China's government more rigorously protects farm land, course architects are being asked to work on wickedly difficult places, including the sides of mountains, expanses of solid rock, and featureless areas such as landfills. Heck, several (if not all) of the courses at the Mission Hills resort on Hainan Island were built on what's been described as “a dense bed of lava rock” that had to be capped with up to three feet of grass-accommodating soil.

“We're going to get complicated sites from now on,” says Mr. West. “They aren't going to give up farm land anymore.”

I'm not suggesting that a shortage of ideal sites is going to slow golf construction in China in an appreciable way or that high-quality courses can no longer be built there. What I'm suggesting is that the future of golf design in the nation may require ever-larger doses of what we used to call American ingenuity.

Mr. East, for example, is working with a major Chinese golf developer on a project within a two-hour drive of Beijing. The course is to be part of a community that includes villas and a hotel, both of which will occupy decent land. For the golf course, Mr. East got what he calls “a severe site.”

“When I first saw it,” he says, “I didn't think there was any way to build a golf course there.”

Of course, where there's a will, there's a way. And when there's a paycheck involved, you can bet that a solution won't be far behind.

anguilla The “Sanctuary” Is Sold

CuisinArt Resort & Spa has acquired the troubled Temenos resort community, the home of the only golf course on the island of Anguilla.

CuisinArt placed the high bid on the half-built, 280-acre community during a public auction in June and closed on the purchase in August. The resort had been dying a slow death since 2008, when its owners decided to quit throwing money at it.

Temenos has beachfront mansions, high-priced villas, a hotel, and an 18-hole, Greg Norman-designed golf course. Simon Fuller, the creator of “American Idol” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” owns property in the community, as does Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code and other novels.

CuisinArt plans to give the resort a new name -- CuisinArt Golf Resort & Spa -- and has promised to make unspecified improvements to the 7,063-yard golf course and its 33,500-square-foot clubhouse. The golf course opened in 2007 and was closed for a spell in 2009, due to the resort's financial difficulties.

One of the island's government officials once called Temenos -- it's a Greek word that means sanctuary -- “the most important project Anguilla ever had.” Late last year a group led by Roger Staubach, the one-time Dallas Cowboys quarterback, had hoped to buy it, but the deal fell through.