The Week That Was, may 20, 2012

india K. D. Bagga, RIP

India’s most prolific and most important golf course architect died last week.

K. D. Bagga -- “Colonel” Bagga, as he liked to call himself -- was hardly known outside India’s golf circles, and his death doesn’t appear to have registered with the nation’s big newspapers. Maybe that’s because he’d dedicated the final 20 or so years of his life to a mostly thankless task: Making golf in India a people’s sport. His work, he told me last year, was the “mad passion” of designing and building “affordable, easily sustainable, and more accessible golf courses for the masses.”

Bagga was 80. An Indian news service reports that he died after “a prolonged illness.” I don’t know what ailed him at the end, but he’d previously undergone a pair of heart bypass surgeries.

I exchanged some e-mails with Bagga a year or so ago, in connection with a story I was writing for Golf, Inc. He intrigued me because he was a blue-collar architect, not unlike the late Geoffrey Cornish. He had no pretensions as a designer, no grand ambitions. He wasn’t in the business for the money or the fame. He was simply a fellow who loved golf and who wanted to share its delights with his countrymen. He truly was someone who “grew the game.”

“The concept of neighborhood golf courses, however small, is my thought,” he said.

Golf design was probably Bagga’s third career. He was first a civil engineer, then a military officer. I don’t know when the golf bug bit him, but he became serious about design in the mid 1990s, when he crossed paths with Ron Fream, a U.S. architect with comparable populist sympathies. Sensing a kindred spirit, Fream taught Bagga the fundamentals of good design and some basic construction techniques and then turned him loose.

The records show that Bagga completed about a dozen golf courses, most of them nine-hole tracks -- Gulmohar Greens Golf & Country Club in Ahmedabad and Jammu Tawi Golf Course in Sidhra among them. His best-known work is almost certainly Kensville Golf & Country Club in Ahmedabad, an 18-hole, championship-length track that carries the “signature” of Jeev Milkha Singh, India’s most successful professional golfer. Kensville is generally regarded to be the best course in the city and one of the best in the country.

When I caught up with Bagga, he was deep into his 70s. I asked if he had any thoughts of retirement, but I knew he didn’t. “I have tried to hang my boots many times,” he told me, but he said he wouldn’t do it if it meant “handing over the baton to anyone not passionate for the game and county.”

It’s too bad that Bagga never found someone he deemed worthy of carrying his baton. If India ever expects to reach its golf-development potential, it could use more people like the Colonel.

And in Other News . . .

. . . mexico Better late than never: The long-delayed Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course at Quivira Los Cabos is under construction and scheduled to open roughly a year from now. The course is one of two “signature” layouts in the master plan for the 1,850-acre oceanfront community, which will eventually sprout luxury houses, a pair of beach clubs, the obligatory spa, a village center, and maybe one of those limited-edition Jack Nicklaus Golf Clubs whose development has been stymied by the Great Recession. It’s been a long haul for Quivira, which has been kicking around since the mid 2000s (if not before), when Ernesto Coppel, its developer, promised that it would soon be “redefining luxury in Los Cabos.” A construction start was set for 2008, then 2009, and then Quivira, like so many of the world’s high-priced golf spreads, made a slow fade to black. But now the tony community is officially back, and that’s encouraging news not just for Coppel, Nicklaus, and Mexico but for developers everywhere who’ve been able to maintain their faith and, perhaps more important, their financial wherewithal.

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

. . . brazil Regarding the land dispute that’s threatening the development of the 2016 Olympics’ golf course: The plot is thickening. A couple of weeks ago, it was revealed that two local groups have laid claim to the property. This week we learned that the city of Rio doesn’t have any proof of ownership and that a Brazilian court is conducting a search for documents that can settle the quarrel once and for all. Unfortunately, a judicial resolution to this sorry escapade could, in the words of the Associated Press, “take months or even years.” It seems like only yesterday that Gil Hanse, the course’s architect, had a perch on top of the world. Today he must be wondering if his sure-thing $300,000 commission is going to turn into yet another project on indefinite hold. People described as “local Olympic organizers” continue to insist that contracts for course design and construction will soon be signed, but I’m quickly losing confidence. To me, all of the players involved seem like nothing more than spiders who don’t realize what a tangled web they’ve weaved.

. . . united states Is golf one of those “leading economic indicators” that can forecast the future? The National Golf Foundation thinks so, and the Jupiter, Florida-based trade group says that these days the industry’s needles and gauges are all pointing up. In particular, the group says, its surveys of “golfer confidence” have shown increases for three consecutive quarters. “It’s not just the weather,” a spokesman for the NGF told the Newport News Daily Press. “People are feeling a little bit better about their financial situation.” Maybe that’s why the number of rounds played in the United States was up by 22 percent in the first quarter of this year.

. . . wild card click Is this what it means to be in tune with the electorate?