The Week That Was, february 24, 2013

     Ernie Vossler, who had a hand in creating one of the most enviable development portfolios in golf history, died last week, after an eight-year battle with dementia. With colleagues at Landmark Land Company and later at Landmark Golf Company -- primary among them Jerry Barton, Johnny Pott, and Joe Walser, Jr., who died last year -- Vossler helped to put the golf scene in Southern California’s Coachella Valley on the map. He and his partners developed at least a dozen golf courses at some of the best-known golf communities in the deserts surrounding Palm Springs, including PGA West, the La Quinta Resort, and Mission Hills Country Club. In addition, Vossler’s group created several other ultra-prominent U.S. golf venues, including Kiawah Island in South Carolina, Palm Beach Polo & Country Club in Florida, and Oak Tree Golf Club in Oklahoma. Landmark Land was forced to sell its properties after engaging in what became a fatal dispute with the U.S. government, but its collected works are unmatched. Vossler was 84.

     An ailing, Greg Norman-designed golf course on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula has been taken over by a local municipality. The nine-hole track (it was originally planned for 18 holes) is the featured attraction of Dunes Port Hughes, which was being promoted as the state’s premier resort community before it fell on hard times. The community, which has racked up more than $13 million in debts, was placed in receivership last summer. “It was the wrong project at the wrong time in the wrong place,” a resident said at the time. The Copper Coast Council now has three years to lay a firm financial foundation under the three-year-old course. “If the golf course cannot establish a viable business plan going forward, the future of the course will need to be reviewed,” the lenders said. “This may mean a different standard of course or potentially the closure of the course.”

     Here we go again: Lee Schmidt and Brian Curley have opened yet another golf course in China, this one along the Changling Reservoir in the eastern part of Hainan Island. The 7,011-yard, Curley-designed track is the centerpiece of White Stone Hot Spring Golf Club, which is emerging on property southwest of Qionghai. In a press release, Curley describes the layout as “very user-friendly” and “sure to please players and owners alike.” The track is Schmidt-Curley’s 14th on Hainan Island, which isn’t subject to the Chinese government’s ineffective moratorium on golf construction. If you’re keeping score, the press release notes that Schmidt-Curley has been involved in the design of “nearly 40” courses in China. No other firm even comes close.

     The Powers That Be in golf constantly talk about “growing the game.” But Ian Andrew, a Canadian architect who never hesitates to speak his mind, believes they’re going about it in the wrong way. “I don’t think they promote growth at all,” Andrew wrote in a recent post at his blog. His argument: I think they depend on growth to support their existing infrastructure, and now that’s come to a standstill. They’re frightened, in many cases. . . . Nobody has addressed the real problem. Everyone is focusing on trying to bring new players to the game, but the biggest issue is retention. The game has become too expensive to play regularly, takes too much time out of our busy schedules, and people leave over the economics. Andrew also addresses the role architects can play in hanging onto players. “In the last couple of decades,” he notes, 90 percent of new courses were designed to meet the demand of 10 percent of players. Only the best can play them, and only the wealthiest can afford to play. We need to reverse the pyramid so that 90 percent of the courses are fun and cheap places to play.

     Club at Clear Creek Tahoe is about to be reborn. The club, part of a 1,600-acre community southwest of Carson City, Nevada, opened in 2009 and then closed last summer, a victim the Great Recession. But the club’s developers, Jim Taylor and Chip Hanly, recently took on new investor-partners and are on track to reopen sometime this spring. Their original plan was to sell lots for 384 single-family houses and to attract 495 members, but the chill in the marketplace may have lowered their expectations. Bill Coore, who co-designed the club’s 6,868-yard course with Ben Crenshaw, reports that some of the layout’s design elements -- bunkers, mostly -- have been spiffed up in preparation for the reopening. “I have every reason to believe it’s going to be successful,” Coore says.

     The Royal & Ancient won the debate regarding the design changes that are being made at the Old Course at St. Andrews, but Geoff Ogilvy thinks the group got its way by being “sneaky.” In an 
 

interview with HK Golfer, the PGA pro (and Michael Clayton’s “signature” design partner) contends that the R&A deliberately announced its intentions on the same weekend that the proposed ban on anchored putters hit the news. “They knew there would be a backlash, so they made sure they had the bulldozers out there ready before anyone could stop it,” Ogilvy contends. “That’s what it felt like, and I think that’s what annoyed everyone the most.” Ogilvy believes that Martin Hawtree will “do a nice job” with the Old Course’s re-do, but he clearly wishes that it wasn’t happening. “It’s the first place that anyone should ever study when they think about golf course architecture,” he said, “and the last place they should touch!”

     In an attempt to avoid further financial losses, the city of Winnipeg hopes to lease four of its worst-performing golf properties to a private-sector group. If the city can find a taker, numbers-crunchers say, it could trim its shortfall dramatically, from $780,530 to $68,854. Prospective operators should be advised that the four courses in question -- Crescent Drive, Harbour View, Kildonan Park, and Windsor Park -- require an estimated $4.6 million in upgrades. All told, the city’s 12 courses are projected to lose $863,500 in 2012, and the agency that operates them reportedly has a deficit of $7.1 million.

     People always say that golfers are among the best-behaved people on the planet, but you wouldn’t know it from mêlées that erupted this week at private clubs in India and the United States. The biggest headlines were made at Chandigarh Golf Club, where the Times of India says “a brawl” involving “enraged golfers” who “struck each other with golf clubs” left “the 16th tee blood splattered and three senior club members wounded.” The scuffle was reportedly sparked by a dispute over “slow play.” The incident here at home occurred at “a routine homeowners association meeting” at Springs Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. After the results of a board election were announced, according to the Desert Sun, unhappy residents began “yelling and pushing” and then graduated to “chair-throwing, fist-fighting, and tackling.” A security guard reportedly pulled his gun during the fracas, and someone involved suffered a seizure. So tell me again, why is golf considered a gentleman’s game?

     Is Britney Spears about to take her game up a notch? Less than a year ago, on the fairways of Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, California, the pop singer was said to be turning “golf balls into weapons of mass destruction.” Today, according to the Celebrity Café, Spears is “considering becoming a member of the country club.” And you thought politics made strange bedfellows.