The Week That Was, august 2, 2015

     If you’re infatuated by “celebrity” and “signature” golf design, you’ll love the new 27 Club in suburban Tianjin, China.
     Borrowing an idea initiated at Legends Golf & Safari Resort in Limpopo Province, South Africa, 27 Club is a posh private retreat that features 27 holes, 26 of them designed by famous male golfers -- Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, John Daly, and Greg Norman among them -- and one by a woman, Annika Sorenstam. It’s China’s latest example of high-concept golf development, a grab-bag of holes by abundantly marketable assets that the developer, Pacific Links International, has gathered primarily to sell real estate in what’s been described as a “six-star international golf resort and high-end residential community.”
     27 Club opened last month, on part of a 425-acre spread that was formerly home to Yangliuqing Golf Club. As best I can determine, Yangliuqing opened in 2006 and was subsequently remodeled by Scottsdale, Arizona-based Schmidt-Curley Design, though obviously not to PLI’s standards. PLI reportedly moved 1 million cubic meters of earth to create the new complex, and it hired not just one but two bona-fide course designers -- Tom McBroom, a Canadian, and Beau Welling, an American -- to unify the celebrities’ disconnected design ideas into a coherent whole.
     27 Club is PLI’s inaugural attempt to bring what it calls “luxury, Western-style golf” to China, a nation where the sport has become a veritable enemy of the state. But PLI doesn’t figure to risk building new courses that might someday be declared illegal and then razed. Over the next three to five years, it aims to acquire a dozen run-of-the-mill golf properties in the Beijing and Tianjin areas, enlist starchitects to oversee makeovers, and operate them as the Pacific Links 27 Club. The chain will also be incorporated into PLI’s membership program, which offers access to more than 100 high-profile golf venues in at least a dozen nations.
     Most likely, the second course in PLI’s Chinese chain will emerge in metropolitan Beijing, on property formerly occupied by Beijing Tian’an Holiday Golf Club. PLI has hired Tiger Woods to create a layout that, in its words, “will stand the test of time and be one of the most prestigious courses in China, and even Asia.” Welling is probably working on the layout in Beijing as well, for he generally serves as Tiger Woods’ “ghost” designer.
     In a press release, McBroom touts 27 Club as “an exceptional golf course and certainly one of the best in China.” The world’s architecture critics have yet to weigh in.

     Gifts of Gab: It appears that we can cross India off our list of potential development hot spots. “India is gone,” Ron Fream says in the August 2015 issue of Asian Golf. Fream, one of the world’s most-traveled golf architects, blames the problem on issues that have long plagued golf development in India, namely fast-evaporating water supplies and the difficulties involved in assembling land. “Together with these factors and the stifling Indian bureaucracy,” he notes, “everything points to a dead end.”