The Week That Was, september 16, 2012

iran What’s That You’re Building?

These days, Iran isn’t just building a nuclear bomb. It’s also building a golf community.

What’s said to be the first golf course to be built in Iran in more than three decades is taking shape in Parand, a planned community about 25 miles southwest of Tehran. The 18-hole track, called Tehran International Golf Club, will be the centerpiece of an 850-acre community that will eventually include houses, a hotel, a school, and other attractions.

A development group called TSI/Iranian Land hired Phil Ryan, an Australian architect, to design the golf course. Ryan’s “international-standard,” 7,185-yard layout will be accompanied by a nine-hole, 746-yard course for beginners and a golf practice center.

Iran has just one existing golf course, a 12- or 13-hole layout at the Enghelab sports center in Tehran. I presume it’s the one that Golf Course Architecture says was built 33 years ago. If I’m assembling various historical records accurately, the course originally had 18 holes, when it was known as Imperial Country Club. According to a 2006 story by the Associated Press, five holes (maybe six) were later “expropriated by the Revolutionary Guards.” A source that I’m not comfortable with says that the holes were taken in 1992. Top 100 Golf Courses reports that the guards needed the space for “tank parking.”

Top 100 Golf Courses also says that golf is “rather popular with Tehran’s young women.” I can’t vouch for the veracity of that statement, but if construction schedules remain on track the nation’s men and women will have a chance to play at Tehran International in 2014 or 2015.

While TSI/Iranian Land has managed to break ground on a golf course, it isn’t the only entity that’s taken a crack at golf development in Iran in recent years.

In the mid 2000s, a golf complex was to be built on the northeastern coast of Kish Island, which is located in the Persian Gulf, off the nation’s southern coast. The complex, which was to be part of a resort community called Flower of the East, was supposed to include an 18-hole, championship-length golf course and a nine-hole practice course. Peter Harradine, an architect with offices in Switzerland and Dubai, had been commissioned to design the golf facilities.

Kish Island seems to be a likely location for future golf development in Iran. The place began attracting vacationers in large numbers in the 1970s, when the shah built a casino there. After the Islamic revolution, in 1979, it began evolving into what it is today, the home of beaches, malls and shopping centers, more than three dozen hotels, and an airport that’s a destination for several dozen daily flights from Tehran.

The Swiss developers who floated the idea for Flower of the East couldn’t get their venture off the ground. One of these days, though, somebody will.

middle east Here We Go Again

Thanks to old-fashioned stimulus spending, some of those oil-fueled development dreams in the Persian Gulf may soon be revived.

“The gulf is on the cusp of another construction boom,” writes Banker Middle East, a boom that will be led by “ambitious infrastructure development drives.”

Citing a study by the Kuwait Financial Centre, the BME reports that the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council -- Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates -- plan to spend more than $968 billion over the next decade on large-scale, government-sponsored construction projects. The bulk of the money will be spent on roads, airports, railways, seaports, schools, hospitals, and similar big-ticket items.

Partly as a result of this spending, the KFC predicts that the gross national product of the FCC nations will hit 4.6 percent in 2012-13, a full percentage point above the 3.6 percent that the world as a whole is expected to reach.

It’s safe to assume that this financial stimulus will eventually give a boost to golf development in the FCC nations, although it’s hard to predict how long it’ll take for the trickle-down to arrive. But if you wake up tomorrow morning and hear a distant huffing and puffing, it may be the sound of Middle Eastern developers blowing the dust off their abandoned golf projects.

slovakia One Down, One To Go at Penati

The Nicklaus empire has opened its first golf course in Slovakia.

The 18-hole, Nicklaus Design track is the first of two courses scheduled to be built at Penati Golf Resort, which is emerging on 300 acres in Senica, a town roughly 60 miles north of Bratislava, the nation’s capital. A press release from Nicklaus’ North Palm Beach, Florida-based firm says that the Legend Course, as it’s known, is “spacious enough to host thousands of spectators and serve as a venue for any international tournament.”

Nicklaus’ 6,536-yard layout will serve as a counterpoint to Penati’s forthcoming course, the first solo effort by Jonathan Davison of Create Golf. A year or so ago, Davison told me that his course, to be called the Heritage, would take shape on property that reminded him of the heathlands around Surrey, England and be “more rustic, natural, and have a more traditional feel” than Nicklaus’ course.

Davison was formerly an associate at a British firm, Ford Golf Group. Nowadays, his website indicates that he’s set up shop in Slovakia.

Davison’s course, which is being shaped by Mick McShane, is scheduled to open next summer.

wild card click Never try to pick up a girl in an art museum.