The Week That Was, december 6, 2015

     Finally, the long overdue, Gil Hanse-designed Riserva Golf Course in Rio de Janeiro has celebrated its “soft” opening, with its official unveiling to come in the spring of next year. For the time being, though, forget that it’ll serve as the venue for the first golf competition that the Olympics have staged since 1904. Never mind that it represents the hopes and dreams of our industry’s institutional leaders, who are betting that it’ll spark both new and renewed interest in golf all over the world. Ignore the fact that it cost $16 million to build, and that its builder -- Pasquale Mauro, a billionaire -- is going to make a small fortune when he sells the condos that have arisen around it. Disregard Brazil’s chilly feelings for golf. Instead, concentrate on this: For as long as it stands, Riserva should remind us of a landmark moment in the history of golf design, the moment when the future of golf architecture was symbolically turned over to a new generation. Riserva might have been designed -- and, some have argued, should have been designed -- by Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, or any one of the better-known old-timers who vied for the opportunity. Instead, the commission went to Hanse, a member of a younger crowd with altogether different ideas about how golf courses should look, feel, and play. It was a changing of the guard. With one fateful decision, golf’s past lost its grip on the present, and the future beckoned.

     Callaway Golf doesn’t appear to have any regrets about its decision to start selling its products in India. “As the game is progressing, we are seeing huge growth opportunity,” Oliver “Chip” Brewer, the company’s CEO, told Hindu Business Line. Specifically, Callaway’s five-year-old Indian subsidiary is seeing 20 percent annual growth in sales of golf equipment, thanks mainly to increased corporate sponsorships and a healthy pace of construction. In fact, Brewer believes that India, which currently has roughly 250 courses, will add 50 or more over the next two years.

     O.B. Sports has injected some life into Tucson, Arizona’s golf operations, but perhaps not enough to keep the lights on at all five of the city’s courses. Last year, despite increases in both income and the number of rounds played -- more than $1 million for the former, nearly 9,000 for the latter -- the city’s courses still managed to lose $1.1 million. As a result, the city’s debate over taxpayer-subsidized golf has been renewed. “We are going to have to make some hard decisions,” a councilmember told the Arizona Daily Star. Tucson’s city manager told Tucson News Now, “There has to be a conversation about potential closure, or at least scaling back of the golf operations.” City officials engaged in this same conversation two years ago, before they hired O.B. Sports to initiate a turnaround. Since then, according to the Star, O. B. Sports has “completed a facelift of the once-stodgy city golf operation,” and the playing conditions at the courses are “as good as they’ve been in more than 15 years, perhaps longer.” Unfortunately, Tucson’s golf courses have a problem that’s difficult to address: A debt load of nearly $8 million.

     Donald “the Candidate” Trump was apparently not sold on buying the Puerto Rican golf course that bears his name. Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico, a bankrupt venue in Coco Beach, has been sold to a San Juan-based investment group called OHorizons LLC. For just $2.2 million, the LLC acquired a pair of 18-hole, Tom Kite-designed golf courses and a 46,000-square-foot clubhouse. The club was cheap because it’s been operating at a loss for close to a decade, a fact that was obviously not lost on Trump, who’d been “considering making a play” for the property. No word yet on whether OHorizons plans to retain Trump’s management, but Trump Golf no longer lists the property in its portfolio.