mexico Waiting for Tom Fazio's Course

The first Tournament Players Club outside the United States has opened golf course number one, and it could break ground on number two sometime this year.

TPC Cancun is taking shape at Cancun Country Club, a 1,116-acre resort community in northern Quintana Roo, Mexico’s favorite vacation destination. At build-out, the community will consist of single-family houses and condos, a boutique hotel, a beach club, and a retail/commercial area.

The facility’s Nick Price-designed course opened earlier this year. Still to come are a 125,000-square-foot clubhouse and a Tom Fazio-designed course that’s scheduled to open in 2014. Price, who’s based in Jupiter, Florida, is also serving as the “player consultant” to Fazio’s course.

“I can’t wait to build it,” says Tom Marzolf, the design associate who’s overseeing the construction for Fazio’s Hendersonville, North Carolina-based firm. “It’s going to be one of the best courses in Mexico.”

TPC Cancun is operated, via a long-term lease, by Borders Golf Group, a Reno, Nevada-based management and consulting firm led by Joseph Petrash. Borders has a local partner, Julio Viscontti of JCV Golf, who markets Greg Norman’s design services in Mexico. The partners eventually hope to build a Norman-designed course at Santa Amelia, a golf community in Los Barriles, a village on the southeastern coast of Baja California Sur.

Like the 32 TPC-branded properties in the United States, the courses at TPC Cancun have been designed to host professional tournaments sponsored by the PGA Tour. The Tour owns 18 of the properties, including TPC Cancun, and as I reported last month, it plans to license a TPC in Beijing, China that will feature a Gil Hanse-designed golf course.

For marketing purposes, Borders has completed one hole on Fazio’s course. The designers don’t know when full-fledged construction will begin, but Marzolf believes it’ll be this year.

“The economy is tough down there,” he notes, “but it’s going to get finished.”

The original version of the preceding post appeared in the June 2012 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.