The Week That Was, july 15, 2018

     Zach Peed has added another link to his chain of “pristine private destination courses” that serve “the needs of executives and corporate entities for retreats and other events.” Peed has reportedly agreed to buy Victoria National Golf Club, a 22-year-old venue that took shape atop a former strip mine outside Evansville, Indiana. Victoria National is home to an 18-hole, Tom Fazio-designed layout that checks in at #43 on Golf Digest’s list of the 100 best U.S. courses. Fazio believes it’s capable of hosting a U.S. Open, and the magazine has described it as “the most unusual, unpolished, and unpretentious Fazio design ever” and “all you could want and expect out of a golf course.” If all goes as planned, the club will become the fifth member of Peed’s Dormie Club, and the second with a Fazio-designed course.

     Just weeks after the negotiations involving its sales to ClubCorp collapsed, Peter Nanula’s Concert Golf Partners has identified a new target: 12 Oaks, the centerpiece of a 687-acre master-planned community in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina. 12 Oaks made its debut in 2009, a most inopportune time for real estate ventures in America, and it was nearly strangled to death by the Great Recession. The 1,100-house spread is now said to be “flourishing” and “expanding,” however, which means that the club could soon see potential members walking through its doors. 12 Oaks features an 18-hole golf course that was co-designed by Michael Nicklaus and John Cope of Nicklaus Design. If the sale is completed, the club will be Concert’s second in the Tar Heel State. Nanula’s company bought MacGregor Downs County Club, also in suburban Raleigh, in 2014.

     Pakistan has found its first brand-name golf architect. Nick Faldo has agreed to design an 18-hole track for what’s been described as “a prestigious golf community” in Multan, a city in Punjab Province that dates back to before the time of Alexander the Great. The course will be the first “signature” layout in Pakistan, and in a press release Faldo asserts that it’ll offer “strategy and facilities equal to memorable championship courses around the world.” He expects to break ground this fall and to open the course in late 2019. Pakistan is currently home to 40 courses, according to Golf Digest, and Faldo has an opportunity to set the standard for those that will built in the future.

     The French care about the World Cup, not the Ryder Cup, and that’s why one of golf’s premier international competitions – set to take place outside Paris in September – is getting a lukewarm reception from locals. “Honestly, nobody knows there’s going to be a Ryder Cup in France,” Michael Lorenzo-Vera, a French professional golfer, confessed to the New York Times. His reasoning: “Golf is not a good thing here. It’s for rich people and spoiled kids.” The French Golf Federation is trying to spark interest in the sport, but the nation’s participation rate is still stuck below 1 percent (0.63 percent in 2016, according to KPMG’s Golf Advisory Practice). If the Ryder Cup can’t give the nation's golf business a boost, it’s hard to imagine what would.

     Like Kim Jong-il, a despised dictator who claimed to have preternatural golfing abilities, Gurbanguly “Spellcheck” Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan allegedly scored a hole-in-one on the new Jack Nicklaus “signature” layout outside Ashgabat. Not that it matters, because Spellcheck tells as many lies as our own president. What’s significant, though, is that the course, which opened last fall, isn’t listed on Nicklaus Design’s website. For that matter, neither are the other courses that the firm has agreed to design for Turkmenistan’s corrupt leader. Maybe this is an oversight, but I think not. If Nicklaus Design is too embarrassed to admit that it cashes checks written by one of the world’s most notorious human-rights violators, it should stop working for him.

     Duly Noted – The Robb Report says that David McLay Kidd’s new course at Sand Valley is “pure gold,” which is presumably the ultimate honor that a publication dedicated to “affluence, luxury, and the best of the best” can bestow. . . . Before the end of the year, FLC Group expects begin operating Bamboo Airways, an airline that will shuttle vacationers to the six resorts it owns and operates in Vietnam. FLC told an Asian news service that its resorts currently welcomes more than 3,000 golfers every month, most of them from South Korea, Japan, and China. . . . Though his father railed against it for years, Eric Trump has conceded that the new off-shore wind farm visible from the freshly renamed Trump Aberdeen “doesn’t spoil this place” or “my enjoyment” of Martin Hawtree’s golf course. In other words, the U.S. president’s irresponsible campaign against sustainable energy was ultimately much ado about nothing.

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