The Week That Was, february 8, 2015

     After pinching pennies for years, U.S. golf courses are once again willing to spend money on capital improvements. In what it describes as “a jolt to the industry” (a welcome jolt, it should be noted), Golf Course Industry reports that 71 percent of the nation’s golf courses will get some sort of bunker improvements over the next three years. The volume of planned work is so high, according to the publication, that many construction companies were almost completely booked for 2015 before the end of 2014. GCI says that 569 superintendents participated in its State of the Industry survey.

     After failing to negotiate a settlement, more than 80 caddies have sued the PGA Tour, seeking to claim a share of the sponsorship fees generated by professional golf. Their argument: They deserve a slice of the estimated $50 million pie because they’re obliged to wear advertising materials while they work, just as the well-paid players do. Tim Finchem, the tour’s wealthy commissioner, told the New York Times that the arrangement in place, which pays nothing to the caddies, is “a good system” and that he wants to “let it go on.” He suggested that the caddies ought to sue the players instead.

     Gifts of Gab, Part One: We all appreciate honesty, and Gil Hanse was especially candid in his appraisal of his new golf course in Rio de Janeiro, the track that will host the golf competition of the 2016 Olympics. “I can honestly say it won’t be the best golf course we ever designed,” the Pennsylvania-based architect told Golf Advisor. The irony, Hanse notes, is that “I can’t imagine we’ll ever build a course that will be viewed by more people in our lifetime.”

     HSBC, one of the golf industry’s biggest benefactors -- and perhaps its most crooked -- has once again been caught running afoul of the law. During the mid 2000s, the giant British banking conglomerate has acknowledged, a Swiss subsidiary schemed to help some of its customers hide assets from tax authorities and evade paying taxes they legitimately owed. HSBC described the illicit activities as “past compliance and control failures” and insists that the subsidiary has subsequently experienced “a radical transformation.” Late last year, HSBC agreed to pay a multibillion-dollar fine for conspiring to rig foreign currency markets, and before that it admitted to laundering money for Mexican drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and rogue governments, including Iran. So I’m wondering: Does HSBC need golf more than golf needs HSBC?

     Just last month, Samuel L. Jackson was waxing poetic about how wonderful it would be to own a golf course in Ireland. As it turns out, the close, deep-pocketed friend he wanted to enlist as his development partner was at the same time harboring a similar dream. J. P. McManus, one of Ireland’s richest people, has purchased Adare Manor, a 700-acre resort in County Limerick that features a Robert Trent Jones-designed golf course. Adare Manor has hosted a pair of Irish Open championships (in 2007 and 2008) as well as a McManus-sponsored pro-am that routinely counts Jackson among its high-profile celebrity contestants. The Irish Examiner estimates that McManus, who reportedly owns a piece of the Sandy Lane golf resort in Barbados, paid “in the region of €30 million” ($32.4 million) for Adare Manor. The seller was Tom Kane, a U.S. businessman who’d owned the resort since the mid 1980s.

     Gifts of Gab, Part Two: Some words have more than one meaning, but other words have no meaning at all. For example, here’s how Gil Hanse defines minimalism: “It’s difficult to understand exactly what that means. I think it means that we as architects will do everything we can to extract and exploit all the natural advantages of a site before we turn to moving earth. But we shouldn’t be afraid to move earth if we have to. If we move earth, we try to make it look natural. And I think, as a group we study landforms so much, and we really focus on that and scale, that maybe we do a little better job when we have to move earth of making it look natural.”

     Gleneagles, the famed golf resort in Perthshire, Scotland, is for sale. The Times of London believes that the 850-acre spread, the site of the Ryder Cup matches in 2014, could sell for more than £200 million ($301 million). Gleneagles, which has been controlled by various whiskey producers since the mid 1980s, features three 18-hole golf courses and a 232-room hotel. It’s profitable, and its current owner, Diageo PLC, suggests that prospective buyers have been beating down its doors since last September’s Ryder Cup, which reportedly attracted 250,000 spectators from 96 nations.

     Gifts of Gab, Part Three: What’s conspicuously missing from Gil Hanse’s recent conversation with Golf Advisor? The answer: Hanse’s most famous client. In one way or another, the interview catalogs nearly all of Hanse’s current work, from his recent re-do of the Blue Monster at Doral to the mostly completed Olympics course in Brazil to the forthcoming tracks at Streamsong and Bandon Dunes. But neither Hanse nor Golf Advisor mentions the course that Hanse has designed for Donald Trump in Dubai, a venue that’s supposedly under construction. This omission is especially curious when one considers how valuable a client Trump has been for Hanse. Did the commission from Trump simply just slip Hanse’s mind, or is there a chill in the air?