china What’s Next for Retief Goosen?

Retief Goosen’s projects in South Africa may have crashed, but the golf pro’s agents at IMG have ensured that their client gets a soft landing.

The aspiring “signature” designer and vintner, a two-time winner of the U.S. Open championship, will lend his name to a 27-hole complex that’s to be built at Dayi Smokey Mountain resort community in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province.

“We could start construction early next year,” Goosen told the Sunday Times earlier this year.

Let’s hope China’s government agrees.

To date, Goosen has designed just one golf hole, the 18th at Legend Golf & Safari Resort outside Pretoria. He’s been commissioned to design courses at two other golf communities in South Africa, in the suburbs of Johannesburg (Lizard Point) and George (Lagoon Bay), but both have become victims of the global economic collapse.

The site at Dayi Smokey Mountain, Goosen says on his website, is “covered in trees and very steep,” but the golf complex “should have a very open, green, undisturbed look to it.”

The nines will range in length from 3,500 to 3,772 yards, and there could be four of them when all is said and done.

Brit Stenson, the director of design at IMG’s office in Cleveland, Ohio, will serve as Goosen’s “ghost” designer.

Some information in this post originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.