united states, John Harbottle III, RIP

For the second consecutive Sunday, I must sadly report about the passing of a notable golf course architect.

Last week it was K. D. Bagga. This week it’s John Harbottle III, a Tacoma, Washington-based designer who was just 53. The Olympian reports that Harbottle, one of the busiest and best-known architects in the Pacific Northwest, died last Thursday in Los Angeles International Airport, after complaining of pain in his neck and shoulder.

Harbottle had golf in his blood. His father won the state of Washington’s senior amateur championship five times, and his mother won the U.S. Women’s Amateur championship in 1955. Their son studied landscape architecture at the University of Washington, and, like so many architects that are doing commendable work today, apprenticed with Pete Dye.

Harbottle established his own firm in 1992, and he produced 15 original courses in Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Hands down, his most celebrated work is the Olympic Course at Gold Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton, Washington. The course, part of a municipal complex, has hosted two national events, including the 2006 PubLinks championship, and two NCAA regional championships.

Like Dye, Harbottle learned his craft in part by studying some of Scotland’s most famous links. His goal, he once said, was to produce “natural-looking golf courses with a links touch.” He occasionally produced them with “signature” contributors, among them Johnny Miller, Peter Jacobsen, and Fuzzy Zoeller.

Nearly a decade ago, in an interview with Travel Golf, Harbottle said that he admired the work of Tom Fazio, Jay Morrish, Dana Fry, Bobby Weed, Rick Jacobson, and Keith Foster. He singled out Donald Ross’ No. 2 course at Pinehurst as his favorite place to play but noted that he also enjoyed the classic layouts at Cypress Point Club, San Francisco Golf Club, and Pine Valley Golf Club.

In the interview, Harbottle provided a glimpse of his design philosophy:

These days, when we have a project where we have to move a lot of dirt, we try to move it in a way that looks like we haven’t moved a lot of dirt. So even though we may be moving mountains in some aspects, we’re still trying to do it so it looks like a classical old site. We’re trying to make the site look like it was made for the golf course, even though at times it may not have been.

More recently, in a story in Southland Golf, Harbottle described a great golf course as one that makes golfers “thrilled to just be there.”

I suppose that, in a nutshell, was what Harbottle tried to achieve with his courses. It’s a pity that he didn’t live long enough to design more of them.

brazil Olympics 2016: Still in Limbo

The blunder in Brazil continues, with no end in immediate sight.

The latest: Elmway Participacoes, the company insisting that it owns the property where the golf course for the 2016 Olympics is to take shape, has formally petitioned a Brazilian court to void any contracts that may have been signed and to block any planned construction projects.

The Associated Press reports that a final ruling on the dispute, which is now threatening the start of the course’s construction (it’s scheduled to begin in October), will be made by the nation’s Brazil's Higher Court of Justice -- the highest court in the land, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Such courts aren’t known for quick deliberations, and the AP once again notes that a decision “could take months or even years.”

I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like this snafu is on the verge of becoming a fubar. City officials in Rio de Janeiro have acknowledged that they don’t have a Plan B to replace their faltering Plan A. Is it time for them to start thinking about one?

talking points Feeling the Earth Move

Like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Oprah Winfrey, Tom Fazio now has a vanity publication: Fazio Premier Clubs.

I haven’t yet seen the inaugural issue (and probably never will, if truth be told), but it features an interview with Fazio conducted by the magazine’s editors. In the interview, by happy coincidence, Fazio addresses a topic that I blogged about last month, in my discussion of “minimalist” and “maximalist” courses.

Here’s Fazio’s perspective on the issue:

Variety is good, but I think minimalism got carried away as a theme. Just because it didn’t take that much to create, I don’t think that makes it any better or worse, and I don’t think because you moved a lot of earth that makes it better or worse. The only thing that counts is the end result. No one cares or wonders how much earth was moved at Cypress Point or Pebble Beach.

And in Other News . . .

. . . canada  Greg Norman’s new golf course in Peachland, British Columbia is under construction and on schedule to open next summer. Strictly speaking, the layout is a replacement course, as it’s taking shape on property that once served as the home of Ponderosa Golf Club. But Norman’s 7,100-yard, tournament-worthy track will bear no resemblance to the original Ponderosa track, which occupied just 58 acres. “The current design will stretch over 400 acres from one end of it to the other,” the club’s general manager told the Vancouver Sun. “It’s absolutely enormous, the biggest one I have seen.” The resort community that’s expected to grow up around the course will also be big, as it’s been master-planned to include more than 2,000 houses, a village center, a hotel, an outdoor theater, a winery, and other attractions.

Some information in the above post originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.

. . . united states Regarding those happier days in the U.S. golf business that I blogged about two weeks ago: My pile of anecdotal evidence is accumulating quickly. The latest morsel of good news has been dished out by Don Padgett, Jr., whose Pinehurst golf resort is ringing up rounds at a pre-Great Recession pace. “It has been a great spring,” Padgett recently told Golf Digest. “Our numbers are back to the 2008 levels. We’ve had an early spring, the weather has been great, [and] the buzz for No. 2 [have] all driven our business levels beyond what we expected. We’re very pleased. . . . We haven’t had a spring like this since 2008.”

. . . wild card click So much for the mistaken belief that men can only talk about sports and sex.