The Week That Was, june 10, 2012

wales Terry Matthews, To the Manor Born

Terry Matthews is again talking about building a fourth golf course at his Celtic Manor Hotel & Country Club in Newport.

Matthews -- he’s known as “Sir” Terry in the United Kingdom -- last spoke publicly about the new course about a year ago, within months after his resort hosted a wildly successful Ryder Cup championship. The course isn’t a new idea, as it’s been on the drawing board since the late 1990s, but it’s reassuring to hear that it hasn’t been forgotten.

Matthews is one of the great characters in the golf business, one who’s as entertaining as Donald Trump. There’s something like fate connected to his ownership of Celtic Manor, seeing as how he was born in a maternity hospital that once operated on the property. He bought the hospital in 1980, converted it into what’s become the resort’s Manor House, and began accumulating land. Today he owns 1,400 acres, upon which can be found a pair of hotels (330 total rooms), a 200-year-old inn, condos, meeting space, a spa, and a slew of recreational amenities.

He brought up the fourth course during a conversation with a reporter from the South Wales Argus, as part of a publicity campaign he’s mounted to secure permission for other, more lucrative development at Celtic Manor. In particular, he aims to add 230 overnight accommodations to the number currently in operation and make Celtic Manor one of the world’s premier meeting destinations.

“The crossover between business and golf is huge, and we’ve got the golf accolades,” he said. “Can I marry up the conference facilities to the golf ones? I think I can. But the government will need to be on our side and support our vision.”

Obviously, Matthews believes that the three courses currently operating at Celtic Manor don’t constitute a crowd. The resort’s first course, Roman Road, was designed by Robert Trent Jones and opened in 1995. The next year, Matthews added Coldra Woods, a par-59 practice course, and he followed it in 1999 with Wentworth Hills, a track designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr.

The Coldra Woods and Wentworth Hills courses were eventually razed. Colin Montgomerie used parts of both tracks to create the resort’s Montgomerie course, which debuted in 2007, and Ross McMurray of European Golf Design used roughly half of Wentworth Hills to create the Twenty Ten Course, which was expressly created to host the 2010 Ryder Cup.

Matthews, the richest individual in Wales (the Argus says he’s worth close to $1.7 billion), doesn’t golf, and so far he hasn’t provided any specifics about Celtic Manor’s next course. The only clue I can provide comes from an interview he did last year with the Western Mail, in which he said that his objective is to offer three championship-length tracks.

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

united states History for Sale

Our nation’s oldest golf course, the forlorn Oakhurst Links in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, will be sold in an auction next month.

The nine-hole track opened in 1884 and remains as old-timey as all get-out, as it can only be played with hickory sticks and gutta-percha balls. Alas, these restrictions have severely diminished the course’s economic prospects, and its owner, Lewis Keller, has decided that he’s had enough.

“It’s going to be very hard to sell,” he told the Charleston State Journal. “I think it may be harder than I anticipate.”

Keller is just the second owner in the course’s history, and these days, at the age of 89, he’s pretty old-timey himself. He’s owned Oakhurst Links since 1959, buying it (with encouragement from a friend, Sam Snead) after it had been abandoned for nearly a half-century. He enlisted Bob Cupp to restore the track in the mid 1990s, and not long afterward it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

For all practical purposes, Keller closed the 30-acre course in 2008 and officially put it on the market in 2009. Shortly thereafter, a local group agreed to buy it for $2.5 million but couldn’t deliver on the promise.

The auction will be held on July 28.

brazil The World’s a Stage

Representatives from the International Olympic Committee were in Rio de Janeiro last week, where they had a front-row seat to view the sideshow that’s taken possession of the 2016 Olympics. And appropriately enough, the IOC even contributed its bit to the drama.

In fact, last week all of the leading actors in this sorry soap opera took the stage.

The spotlight shined most brightly on the lawyer for Elmway Participacoes, the company that’s laid a claim on the property where the games’ golf course is to be built. Sergio Antunes Lima, Jr. announced to the Associated Press that his client is “not against having the golf course built on the land” and is therefore “willing to negotiate” with city officials if the nation’s courts give it possession of the property.

Applause rocked the rafters. Some in the crowd had been afraid that Elmway was planning to go off script.

“We can definitely negotiate after the court rules in our favor,” said Lima. “Elmway is willing to sit down and listen to what the city has to say and see what it has to offer. It will be a business negotiation, but the company will not be intransigent when it gets the land.”

Lima’s chief antagonist, the city’s mayor, was also in an agreeable mood, as he professed his willingness to “make a deal with whoever owns the land.”

As if he has any other options.

For its part, the IOC stayed in character, maintaining its perpetually bright smile and sunny disposition. “We are fully confident we will find a solution,” stated its executive director, although he didn’t explain why.

Maybe we’re supposed to figure out what’s happening behind the scenes on our own.

talking points The Half-Full Monty

You can add Colin Montgomerie’s name to the list of those who believe that golf participation is down because too many of today’s golf courses are too long and too difficult for Joe Average.

Here’s what the former Scottish golf star and “signature” architect had to say on the subject in his new book, Monty: An Autobiography: “The biggest mistake in modern design -- and I have been guilty of it myself -- is making courses too long.”

Of course, talk is cheap. These days Montgomerie has a course in the works in Kazakhstan that’s supposedly going to stretch to 8,019 yards. It doesn’t appear that he’s learned from his mistakes, does it?

wild card click  Here’s just one of many reasons I have to miss Chicago.