romania Here Comes the Sun Garden

Working in the unofficial capital of Transylvania hasn’t yet given Robert McNeil a taste for blood, but it has convinced him that golf has a promising future in former Soviet republics.

McNeil, an architect based in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, expects to break ground this summer on the fifth golf course in Romania, a nine-hole track that will serve as a drawing card for the Sun Garden resort in Cluj-Napoca. The 100-acre resort already offers a hotel, a spa, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a banquet center, and a wedding chapel.

Cluj-Napoca may be the second-largest city in Romania -- its metropolitan area has a population of just under 400,000 -- but Sun Garden’s course will be its first. In fact, the player-friendly, 3,200-yard layout will be the only golf venue within a two-hour drive.

“This is a big deal for this part of the country,” says McNeil. “We’re bringing golf to a place that’s never had it.”

Of course, the reason Cluj doesn’t have any courses is because it hasn’t needed any. KPMG’s Golf Advisory Practice reports that Romania has just 550 “registered” golfers out of a population of nearly 22 million people. The nation once had six golf properties, but World War II and decades of suffocating communist rule put an end to them. Currently just two 18-hole courses are in play, Paul Tomita Golf Club in Alba and Tite Golf Club in Recas, as well as a pair of nine-hole tracks near Bucharest.

But the game is going to establish itself in northwestern Romania, at least if Nicolae Capusan has anything to say about it. Capusan owns Sun Garden, and he’s enlisted McNeil to design courses for two other parcels he owns nearby.

Capusan believes that golf development in Romania is “an act of courage.” McNeil thinks so too, in large part because so many of the nation’s people appear to be living a century behind the times. “If you go a mile away from Sun Garden,” he says, “there are no cars. People travel by horse and buggy.”

Nonetheless, this year McNeil also expects to scout sites for potential courses in Romania’s closest neighbors, Moldova and Serbia.

“I’m a believer in this part of the world,” he says. “Golf is just becoming popular here.”

The original version of the previous story appeared in the May 2012 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.