The Week That Was, may 12, 2013

     Two of New Zealand’s oldest, most prominent golf clubs appear to be on the verge of a merger. Fit to be tied are Royal Auckland Golf Club and Grange Golf Club, which are located on adjacent property in suburban Auckland, on the North Island. Between them, the clubs have hosted every major amateur and professional championship the nation has to offer, including the New Zealand Open on numerous occasions. Presuming the talks successfully conclude, most of Grange’s 112-acre property, which is said to be worth more than $40 million (about $34 million U.S.), would be sold to a residential developer. “This land is highly valuable,” a local real estate agent told the New Zealand Herald. “It would be a very desirable opportunity.” Not all of the Grange is likely to be lost, however. The clubs may hold on to four or five holes, either to be incorporated into Royal Auckland’s layout or to stand alone as part of a practice facility.

     The original version of the preceding post first appeared in the May 2013 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.

     Golf still contributes far more to California’s economy than many other popular forms of entertainment -- amusement and theme parks, fitness-related activities and recreational sports, movie theaters and drive-ins -- but its impact has declined since the state fell into the grip of the Great Recession. In 2011, according to a study by SRI International and GOLF 20/20, golf was worth $13.1 billion in direct and indirect spending, $2 billion less than in 2006. The number of jobs supported by golf in the Golden State has also declined, from 160,000 in 2006 to 128,000 in 2011. On the operations side of the business, California’s golf facilities -- 921 golf courses, 84 stand-alone ranges, and 65 miniature golf properties -- generated $3.34 billion in revenues in 2011. However, only $8.4 million was spent on the construction of new courses in 2011, an amount so low it would be instructive to learn when it was last matched.

     From heavy-metal guitarist to golf course designer, K. K. Downing’s career trajectory has been like no other in our business. And now the former Judas Priest front man is proceeding with the next phase of development at Astbury Hall, his 320-acre estate in
 

Shropshire, England, with an eye toward landing an event on the European Tour. “If you look at the Belfry or Gleneagles, the difference is they have bars and hotels around the course,” Downing’s development partner told the Birmingham Post. “That is what the PGA are looking for, and that is why this is a huge opportunity for Astbury Hall.” This summer, Downing expects to break ground on 45 holiday houses, to be followed by a hotel, a spa, and a high-quality restaurant. The construction will reportedly be funded by investors from the United Kingdom and China.

     Things may soon get a little easier for golf developers in Cyprus. Drowning in debt and suffocated by a fast-shrinking economy, these days Cyprus, like many nations desperate for growth, has decided to get into the swim of tourism in a bigger way. This year the nation’s government is expected to issue licenses for one or two casinos and offer what’s been described as “an incentive scheme aiming at accelerating the construction of golf courses.” Cyprus currently has five or six golf properties, depending on who’s doing the counting, and there are two in the Turkish-controlled northern part of the country. For years, however, the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite has believed that it could support as many as 14 courses, and it appears that the nation’s tourism interests believe that their construction has become a necessity. Of course, the nagging problem in Cyprus continues to be a lack of water.

     The original version of the previous post first appeared in the May 2013 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.

     After the PGA Tour dropped its planned suspension of Vijay Singh, how did the admitted user of a banned substance express his appreciation? He slapped the Tour with a lawsuit, as punishment for treating him unfairly and damaging his reputation. “I am proud of my achievement, my work ethic, and the way I live my life,” Singh said in a statement distributed by the Associated Press. It’s hard to predict where the sport goes from here. When a professional organization doesn’t enforce its regulations, you eventually get chaos.

     What’s the likelihood that Trinity Forest Golf Club gets built? You can bet your house on it. The much-ballyhooed development venture in Dallas, Texas is “moving about as fast as you will see any project of this scale and complexity go through city hall,” the Dallas Morning News reports. In addition, the newspaper says that the entity created to operate the club, the Company of Trinity Forest Golfers -- the name is a salute to Muirfield’s Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in Scotland -- is “well on its way to raising the money it needs to build the course.” The deal will likely be finalized by the end of August, and the groundbreaking for the club’s Coore & Crenshaw-designed course is expected to take place soon afterward.

     Speaking of Coore & Crenshaw, Darius Oliver has put the design duo’s recently opened golf course on Hainan Island on his Planet Golf World 100. Shanqin Bay Golf Club, the first Chinese property to earn a spot on the list, is the centerpiece of a pricey private club created by Wang Jun, the princeling and former arms trader who now serves as the vice chairman of the China Golf Association. Shanqin Bay checks in at #49, ahead of Chicago Golf Club (#50), the West course at Winged Foot in New York (#52), the Alisa course at Turnberry (#53), and Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand (#60). “There is quality all over Shanqin Bay, and the only real disappointment is that so few golfers will ever get to play the course,” Oliver writes. “Had it been more accessible, this could have been a real game-changer for Chinese golf.” If you’re wondering about the price of admission, take a deep breath: Oliver reports that the club’s initiation fee is about $1 million.

     The top golf course in Egypt is the Allegria, an 18-hole, Greg Norman-designed track that opened in 2010. “The Allegria stands head and shoulders above all the other golf developments that have opened for business in Egypt since the late 1990s, and it sets a very high benchmark for world-class golf in the region,” says Top 100 Golf Courses of the World, which has produced what it calls “the first ever” ranking of the nation’s finest venues. While Norman can brag about being number one, however, two U.S. architects have claimed four spots on the list. John Sanford has the #3 and #10 courses (Taba Heights Golf Club and Madinat Makadi Golf Course), while Karl Litten has the #7 and #9 courses (the Championship track at Dreamland and Stella Di Mare Golf & Country Club). The rest of the list includes courses by three other “signature” designers (Nick Faldo, Gary Player, Peter Thomson) as well as work by Peter Harradine and Yves Bureau.

     These days, golf is getting dressed -- or is it re-dressed? -- to the nines. Bill Pennington of the New York Times has written an ode to playing nine holes, and Golf Digest is leading an initiative that it hopes will encourage nine-hole play. Talk about your major departures: Golf has been selling 18-hole rounds as the real thing for decades, while nine-hole courses have been classified as second-class citizens. Was all that merely a sales job, persuading us to buy something we really didn’t want or need? Less than 30 years ago, Pennington notes, “there was no stigma” attached to the number nine, and he encourages us to make Time for Nine. Golf Digest’s editor in chief explains his thinking this way: “Every other recreation, it seems, takes more or less two hours: movies, dinner, cocktail parties, tennis, bowling, going to the gym. If golf were invented today, it would be a nine-hole game.” Clearly, this reinvention is going to take some getting used to. But maybe the Golf Channel has come up with a slogan that hits the marketing nail on the head. “Nine holes are better than nothing.”