The Week That Was, february 3, 2019

     Alice Dye’s death leaves a void in an industry controlled by privileged men.
     Dye, who died last week at 91, was an individual of great accomplishments as an amateur player and course designer and a determined advocate for the place of women in a sport that routinely shuns them. The men who’ve so far commented on her passing remember her as “a trailblazer,” “the Patron Saint of the Forward Tee,” the “consummate partner” to her much more famous husband, and “the first lady of golf architecture.”
     That last phrase strikes a particular chord for me, because I remember a comment Dye made almost exactly a year ago, when she recalled what “a struggle” it was for her to become the first female member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. And I can’t help but note that not one of the many obituaries I’ve read since I learned of her death reached out to a woman for a tribute. If anyone needs further proof that golf remains fundamentally an old boys’ club, there it is.
     The men who grip the levers of power in our business need to recognize and remove the obstacles that women have to overcome in order to make valuable, lasting contributions. If there’s a lesson to be learned from a person’s life, that was Dye’s.

     Greg Norman is capitalizing on his role as Vietnam’s tourism ambassador. In a conversation with Golf magazine, “the Living Brand” reports that he hopes to start building a golf course next year on property that has “sand dunes that dwarf anything you’ve seen.” He’s also snooping around for golf-friendly sites outside the city of Sa Pả, in mountainous Lào Cai Province. Unfortunately, he provided no details. For some perspective, Lonely Planet says that Sa Pả’s tiny, remote villages, in the northwestern part of the nation, seem “a world apart,” and Wikipedia remarks that the people who live in the area are “very poor even by Vietnam’s rural standards.”

     The ink hadn’t even dried on its contract with Genzon Golf Club before European Tour Properties added another property to its fast-growing collection of branded destinations. The tour’s second signee of 2019 (and its third in the past three months) is Constance Lemuria, a high-priced, 250-acre resort on Praslin, a tropical island in the Seychelles that Lonely Planet regards as “a wicked seductress” with “lots of temptations.” Constance Lemuria is home to the only 18-hole course in the Seychelles, a track that was co-designed by Rodney Wright and Marc Antoine Farry, a Frenchman who used to play on the European Tour. Top 100 Golf Courses considers it to be “quite a fine golf course,” and an online reviewer says it’s set in a landscape that’s “so beautiful it becomes almost impossible to describe.” Constance Lemuria resort is owned by Constance Hotels & Resorts, which also maintains a 36-hole complex at its resort on Mauritius, another island in the Indian Ocean. In a press release, the tour said it was “committed to building the reputation of the venue.”

     Peter Thomson’s former design associates at now-defunct Thomson Perrett & Lobb have set out to blaze fresh trails with new partners. South Melbourne, Australia-based Ross Perrett has joined Karrie Webb, a member of the LPGA Hall of Fame, to create Perrett Webb, while Tim Lobb, who operates out of an office in London, England, is looking to find clients in Canada via a collaboration with Alex Hay, who used to work for European Golf Design. The Lobb-Hay venture hasn’t yet signed any contracts (in a press release, Hay reports that it has “a number of exciting prospects that we are reviewing”), but Perrett Webb has been commissioned to turn Indooroopilly Golf Club, in suburban Brisbane, Queensland, into “a world-class facility.”

     Year over year, the number of rounds played on South Carolina’s Grand Strand, a bellwether of the U.S. golf market, fell by more than 7 percent in 2018. The culprit, according to the Myrtle Beach Sun News, is “one of the worst weather years in memory.” On the bright side, however, course owners and operators in the Myrtle Beach area expect an uptick this year.

     ClubCorp, once a golf company but now a self-described “lifestyle company,” has a master plan for growth that involves upscale dining, aquatics, fitness, wellness, racket sports, and various forms of family-based entertainments, including high-tech golf gaming. David Pillsbury, the company’s CEO, thinks such family-friendly, “low-friction” attractions can function as a gateway to golf, which, as he and many others believe, intimidates people with its steep learning curve. ClubCorp’s idea is to introduce the sport in enjoyable, easily digestible nuggets and, slowly but surely, get its members hooked on it.  
    “I believe that for decades now that most of the problems in golf are self-inflicted,” Pillsbury explained in an interview with the National Golf Foundation. “We don’t have a demand problem or an interest problem, we have a conversion problem. That’s a function of our inability as an industry to convert people who are interested in the game into becoming golfers. That’s because there’s so much friction in the process of conversion. So, what we’re after is taking that friction away, using all the contemporary tools to make golf more attractive, more fun, less intimidating, so we can migrate people down the funnel to ultimately become core, avid golfers. We believe, certainly within our ecosystem, you might start out as a fitness member, but if we’ve done our job, five or 10 years later you should be enjoying golf. That’s up to us. We have to manage that conversion from interest to trial. That’s where I think the industry has fallen short.”

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