The Week That Was, april 19, 2015

     Bloomberg has published a partial list of Augusta National Golf Club’s members, and nobody will be surprised to hear that those who’ve been named constitute a veritable who’s who of people who wield the most power and influence in our nation. (It’s worth noting that USA Today published a similar list in 2002.) Bloomberg’s catalog includes Augusta National’s three female members (Condoleeza Rice, Virginia Rometty, and Darla Moore) as well as several folks who need no introduction, among them Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Roger Goodell, and Sam Nunn. Also on the list are the current or former CEOs and chairmen of many well-known corporations, including AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, McKinsey & Company, Coca-Cola, Visa USA, Yahoo!, U.S. Steel, Norfolk & Southern, J. C. Penney, the Atlanta Braves, Caterpillar, Cox Communications, and Harris Teeter. If there’s a better place to do business in America, I don’t know it.

     In “Golf Around the World 2015,” its freshly published tally of all the golf courses on the planet, the R&A delivers a message to the pessimists who still think golf development is in decline: “Overall, the sport’s influence is spreading, and closures have been more than offset by the expansion of the sport across the globe.” This upbeat hypothesis is a response to gloomy economic data that can’t easily be dispelled, and the R&A beats it like a drum. Over and over, the study says things like “golf is undoubtedly spreading around the globe” and “new courses are opening in interesting places” and “the sport is reaching parts of the world where golf has not been present before.” Every one of those phrases is indisputably true, but the R&A ought to be honest about why the size of our global footprint matters so much. The painful truth is that “underdeveloped regions,” as the R&A calls them, are nowadays the only ones willing to buy what we’re selling. Because golf development has been stagnant for years in Europe, Australia, and North America -- our largest, long-established markets -- our only alternative is to blaze new trails in far-flung places. We are desperately seeking growth, and Asia and Africa have become our last best hope. If the world is our oyster, they’re the pearls.

     The original version of the preceding post first appeared in the April 2015 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.

     Last month, a columnist for the Shenzhen Daily claimed that many golf courses in China are “on the brink of bankruptcy” but offered no evidence to support his contention. Now we’re hearing echoes of the same claim from Beijing Today, which cites unidentified “industry analysts” as saying that “less than a third of the [nation’s] courses turn a profit.” Again, the newspaper provided no quantitative evidence. But when you hear the same thing over and over, you start to believe it.

     A family-owned resort in southwestern Michigan has hired Tom Doak’s firm to create its sixth 18-hole golf course. “We see this as an opportunity to grow our business and offer our customers more opportunity to play fun, interesting, and challenging golf courses,” said Jon Scott, one of the principals of Gull Lake View Golf Club & Resort. One of the tracks at Gull Lake View was designed by William Mitchell, but the others were designed by members of the Scott family. The new course is expected to have “very strong links-type characterstics,” and the resort expects to break ground on it in June and to open it in the summer of 2016. Reading between the lines of a press release, it appears that Doak himself will have little to do with the layout’s design and construction. His top associates at Renaissance Golf Design -- Eric Iverson, Don Placek, Brian Schneider, and Brian Slawnik -- will oversee the work.

     Golf isn’t a new sport in Ecuador -- the game was established there in the 1920s -- but the nation hasn’t yet managed to produce any destination-worthy venues. Steve Smyers, an architect based in Lakeland, Florida, hopes to give traveling golfers a reason to visit this summer, when his Costa Jama Golf Course makes its official debut. The 18-hole track will be the centerpiece of a 900-acre resort community in an equatorial village along Ecuador’s Pacific coast, and Smyers told Jay Flemma that the site is “an absolutely spectacular natural setting for golf.” Smyers has made a name for himself with several original designs in the United States (notably, his course at Isleworth Golf & Country Club in Orlando, Florida), but he’s also responsible for new courses and renovations in Australia, England, France, and Zimbabwe. Costa Jama is his first course in South America and somewhere between the seventh or 11th in Ecuador, depending on who’s doing the counting.

     The original version of the preceding post first appeared in the February 2015 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.

     The president of Rogers Media, a division of the Canadian sports conglomerate that owns the Toronto Blue Jays, will be the new CEO of the European Tour. Keith Pelley will assume the position this summer. He has plenty of experience in professional sports -- baseball, football, hockey -- but none in golf, though he is a member of two private golf club in the Toronto area. Pelley was chosen, the tour says, because he has lots of experience in rights management and negotiations, sponsorship creation, television production, marketing, brand development, event management, and related areas of business. In particular, the tour’s chairman said in a press release, Pelley has “a strong grasp of the challenges and opportunities facing not only the European Tour but the wider game of golf as a whole,” and he’ll bring “an innovative approach to the development of the European Tour on the global stage.” Pelley replaces George O’Grady, who’ll become the tour’s president of international relations.