Desolation Row, april 3, 2015

     Malibu, California. Less than a year after it secured permission to build new facilities and proceed with a long-desired makeover of its golf course, Malibu Country Club has filed for bankruptcy protection. The club, part of a 650-spread in the Santa Monica Mountains, has reportedly defaulted on a $47 million loan, and its lender has initiated foreclosure proceedings. Malibu features an 18-hole, William F. Bell-designed golf course that opened in 1977. The track was built by a group of Japanese monks, reportedly as “a tribute to God.” Last summer, the managing partner of the club’s ownership group described the course as “functionally obsolete” and claimed that it lost $1 million a year.

     Gulf Breeze, Florida. Tiger Point Golf Club is bleeding red ink, and its losses have become too large for the city to bear. “We face some hard choices about what to do next with that facility,” a councilmember told the Pensacola News Journal. The city bought the club in 2012, reportedly for $2.8 million, to ensure that it had a place to spray treated waste water from its nearby sewage treatment plant. But the course has lost nearly $1 million since it the city took ownership, and the loss in the current fiscal year is expected to exceed $553,000. The city is currently searching for a consultant capable of “shaping a realistic vision for the future” of the club.

     Birmingham, Alabama. The end is near for Altadena Country Club, which can no longer make the payments on its lease. “We started getting in trouble in ’05,” the club’s general manager told the Birmingham Business Journal. “It’s never been easy. It’s been more difficult every year.” Altadena features an 18-hole golf course, with one nine designed by Larry Nelson and the other by Gary Player. An agreement is in place that will allow a local development group to build houses on roughly half of the club’s 122 acres, while the remaining property is conveyed to the city of Vestavia Hills for use as a park. The club, which has been around since early 1960s, has announced that it’ll close at the end of next month.

     Cañon City, Colorado. Shadow Hills Golf Club isn’t expected to operate in the 2015 season, and its long-term future is in doubt. “It is [a] heartbreaking but a realistic business decision that we can no longer subsidize its operation,” one of the club’s owners told the Cañon City Daily Record. The first nine holes at Shadow Hills were created by a coal-mining company in the 1920s, and Keith Foster later redesigned the original track and added a second nine. In 2010, the property was purchased out of receivership by Bill and Bonnie Holt and Beth Holt Madone, who are hoping that the city will take it off their hands, as part of a lease that would cost only $1 a year. The city is said to be crunching the numbers, but so far it hasn’t made any promises.

     Glyndon, Minnesota. Time has run out on Ponderosa Golf Course. The nine-hole track went dark last month, after serving up affordably priced rounds to golfers in the Fargo area for more than 50 years. “Low-cost golf couldn’t continue,” said the president of Minnesota State University, which identified the course’s 130 acres for expansion many moons ago. The Forum reports that Ponderosa typically rang up between 12,000 and 15,000 rounds a year.

     Westfield, Indiana. If local officials agree to a rezoning, Wood Wind Golf Course will be razed and replaced with something the Indianapolis area really needs: More than 300 single-family houses. The 210-acre course, co-designed by Ron and Gary Kern, is operated by Cohoat & O’Neal Management, on a lease that expires at the end of this year.

     Overland Park, Kansas. Though many nearby residents have objected, Brookridge Golf & Fitness may soon be plowed up and covered with houses, office space, hotels, a theater, a shopping area, and other attractions. “Some people don’t want to see change, which is understandable, but change really is inevitable,” the course’s owner, Chris Curtin, told the Kansas City Star. Curtin, a developer, bought Brookridge’s 138 acres from a Los Angeles, California-based investment group, Capital Foresight, which believed it had a can’t-miss formula for turning around troubled golf properties. Some of the city’s elected officials have reservations about Curtin’s proposal, but they haven’t closed the door on it.

     Milton, Florida. On the first day of June, Whiting Field Naval Air Station will pull the plug on its 18-hole golf course. Frank W. Dahlinger Golf Course hasn’t operated profitably “for many years,” according to a press release, and it was “red-flagged” for potential closing by military accountants in 2009. “The course is unsustainable and simply costs more to operate than the revenue it brings in,” said Whiting Field’s commanding officer. Dahlinger opened with a nine-hole layout in 1948, and the base added a second nine in 1965. Bubba Watson set the course record, a 62, in 1999.

     Grove City, Ohio. In Greek mythology, a phoenix is a bird that perpetually rises from its own ashes. But such a fairy tale has no relevance to Phoenix Golf Links, a Tim Nugent-designed, 19-hole track (that’s no typo) that was born on a landfill outside Columbus and met its eternal end last month. The landfill’s owner, the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, appears to be somewhat relieved about the outcome, because all that perpetually rises from the course are methane leaks.