The Week That Was, june 8, 2014

     The Asia Pacific Golf Group, for years an unabashed promoter for Asian golf, has had a change of opinion regarding golf development in China.
     The Singapore-based group, best known as the organizer the annual Asia Pacific Golf Summit, has concluded that China’s golf industry has hit the skids and won’t recover anytime soon. “The Chinese dragon seems to have lost its puff,” it writes in the June issue of Asian Club Business.
     Such a reappraisal reflects the angst that’s become palpable as China’s golf business falls from its dizzying heights. In its anonymously written cover story, Asian Club Business says that golf course architects are “very disappointed with the pace of golf course development in China, or the lack of it.” It notes that fewer people went through the turnstiles at this year’s Beijing Golf Show, with “a big drop in registered attendance for architects and designers.” It quotes an unnamed architect as saying, “Golf in China has been awful for over two years now” and allows another to complain about “all the crappy Chinese courses built by bad designers that nobody wants to play on.”
     Asian Club Business also has misgivings about the future of golf in China, due mostly to the industry’s poisonously close relationship with home builders. Like other analysts, the magazine fears that the nation’s real estate market “may collapse,” a prospect it believes would have dire consequences for golf development because “most golf courses in China are built as an excuse to develop real estate.”
     “Golf development in China is rarely connected with a genuine interest to develop and grow the game,” the magazine sadly notes.
     Maybe that’s why there are so many crappy courses in the People’s Republic.

     For a more upbeat analysis of the current state of the golf industry, look no further than Donald Trump. During a recent visit to Dubai, where he’s building a Gil Hanse-designed golf course, Trump dismissed the evidence of golf’s decline and various downbeat projections about the game’s future. “Worldwide, golf is the hottest thing there is, and in the U.S. it’s doing really, really well,” Trump told Arabian Business. “Nothing is really even close to it. You go to China, all over Asia, South America -- golf is just booming.” So who do you believe?

     The last rites have already been read to one of Salt Lake City, Utah’s financially distressed municipal golf courses, and now it looks as if only an act of God can prevent further closings. The city is pulling the plug on Jordan River Par 3 Golf Course at the end of the current golf season, and the Salt Lake Tribune reports that three 18-hole tracks -- the Wingpointe, Forest Dale, and Glendale courses -- have been put on the endangered list as well. “Doing nothing is not an option,” a councilmember told the newspaper. “The longer we delay, the harder it gets.” Only three of Salt Lake City’s eight golf properties are safe. The city’s golf operation -- $1 million in the red and desperate to fund $23 million worth of capital improvements -- is said to be “financially unsustainable.”

     Memo to struggling municipal golf courses in Great Britain: It’s your own fault. At least that’s the message being delivered by Maureen Brooker, the chairperson of the National Association of Public Golf Courses. All too often, Brooker believes, municipalities milked their golf facilities for all they were worth and failed to make capital improvements that might have generated consistent play over the long term. “Councils for many years reaped the benefit of good profits from municipal courses, but under-investment and the taking of these profits to put into council coffers brought many into decline,” she said in a comment published by Golf Club Management. “Courses need to be maintained correctly to attract golfers and members, and the facilities need to be adequate and kept to a decent standard.” As has been well documented, in recent years British munis have been suffering as much as their U.S. counterparts, and the magazine notes that “the situation has continued to deteriorate this year.” Brooker is trying to convey an important lesson, but it’s too little too late.

     Another surprise from Brazil: The golf course for the 2016 Olympics -- supposedly a grow-the-game initiative for a nation with precious few public venues -- is guaranteed to be public for just 10 years. “It’s not clear how the course will be run after that,” notes a dispatch from the Associated Press. And it may be completely unrelated, but the AP also notes that the course will be flanked by some of the most expensive real estate in Rio de Janeiro: four 20-story towers whose 160 residential units will cost between $2.5 million and $7 million apiece. How cynical does one have to be to see a private club on the horizon?

     As expected, Pinehurst Resort & Country Club has closed on its purchase of National Golf Club. National’s 25-year-old Jack Nicklaus “signature” golf course will become Pinehurst No. 9, a number that the famed resort in North Carolina has been trying to assign for years. Originally, No. 9 belonged to a new, Rees Jones-designed course that was unfortunately never built. Then it appeared that No. 9 would be worn by the Pit, a defunct, Dan Maples-designed layout in nearby Aberdeen that Pinehurst bought three years ago. So now that No. 9 has finally been awarded, what’s Pinehurst’s plan for No. 10? Will it commence work on a Coore & Crenshaw track where the Pit once stood, give the green light to Jones, or come up with something completely different?