The Week That Was, april 28, 2019

     Golf-course designers love awards, but they hate rankings. That being said, don’t look for Jack Nicklaus, Coore & Crenshaw, and Tom Doak to complain about where they fall on an evaluation recently published by a reputable British website: They’re regarded as being among the top five architects of all time.  
     Top 100 Golf Courses, which aims “to connect passionate golfers with the world’s greatest golf clubs,” has done what it calls “the unthinkable”: It’s developed “a scoring system” that it believes can “reasonably” identify the greatest architects in history. Readers who wish to wade through the details of how Top 100 came to its conclusions can do so on their own. Suffice to say that the website’s panelists crunched some numbers and weighed a wealth of opinions and eventually compiled a list of 100 designers who “positively impacted golf course design.”
     Without question, this exercise has been designed to start some discussions and spark some arguments. To give itself a bit of cover, though, Top 100 notes that it “stopped short of actually ranking the architects.” Instead, it says it “loosely sequenced” the architects into 10-member “tiers,” starting with a group led by Harry Colt and Alister MacKenzie and ending with Robbie Robinson, Perry Dye, Charles Redhead, Ron Kirby, and Allan Robertson. The list skews toward famous dead architects, as such lists typically do, by roughly two to one.
     Of the roughly one-third who are alive and generally regarded as U.S. architects, Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Pete Dye, and Tom Fazio are included among the top 10. Greg Norman finds a home among the top 20, while David McLay Kidd, Kyle Phillips, and Gil Hanse are ranked among the top 30. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find Gary Player (whose office is in the United States even if he often isn’t), Tom Weiskopf, Ernie Els (a situation similar to Player’s), Lee Schmidt & Brian Curley, Mike DeVries, Rees Jones, Michael Hurdzan, Dana Fry, P. B. Dye, Arthur Hills, and Brian Silva.
     Though golf architecture is a dynamic profession, Top 100 says it expects its list “to remain relatively static” in the near term. And while designers may object to rankings both in general and in particular, let’s face facts: We rank professional athletes, chefs, movie directors, vacation destinations, and just about every other group of people, places, and things anybody can think of. Course designers may wish for immunity, but it needn’t be granted.

     Scrape away the irrelevant news about improved television ratings for professional events and increases in “off-course participation,” and there are three important takeaways from the National Golf Foundation’s Golf Industry Report for 2019.
     First, U.S. golf participation as we’ve defined it for decades – by the number of people who pay money to play traditional games of golf on actual golf courses – grew only fractionally in 2018, from 23.8 million to 24.2 million. This may be, as the NGF notes, the “first measured increase in 14 years,” but it means that participation remains at the level our industry had prior to the Great Recession.
     Second, the number of rounds played fell to 434 million, a decline of 4.8 percent from 2017. The NGF blames the decrease on “heavier precipitation levels than normal across the country during the busiest months for golf.”
     Third, golf courses continue to go out of business at a precipitous pace. The NGF reports that 198.5 of what it inelegantly calls “18-hole equivalent courses” closed last year, while just 12.5 opened. The number of 18-hole equivalent golf courses in the United States currently stands at 13,777, down from 15,007 in the peak year of 2005. The “correction,” as the NGF has long framed it, that began in 2006 will continue “for another few years.”
     The NGF claims to be “bullish” on golf’s future, but people who are currently involved in U.S. golf operations don’t have much cause for optimism. Progress remains elusive.

     Arcis Golf, the second-largest owner/operator in the U.S. golf industry, has put one of its competitors out of business. For an undisclosed price, Blake Walker’s Dallas, Texas-based firm has acquired the five remaining golf properties, all of them in Texas, owned by Dominion Golf Group. The venues are located in and around Austin (Onion Creek Club, River Place Country Club, and Twin Creeks Country Club) as well as in suburban Dallas (Lantana Golf Club), and in San Antonio (Dominion Country Club). In a press release, Arcis described its latest acquisition as “one of the most attractive asset-quality portfolios in the golf industry” and said the purchase represented “a significant enhancement” to its “carefully curated collection of lifestyle properties.” (For what it’s worth, Golf Digest doesn’t list any of the clubs’ courses on its ranking of the Lone Star State’s top 25.) Arcis, which claims to be “reinventing the modern club experience,” now owns more than five dozen golf courses, 18 of them in Texas. Its press release doesn’t explain why Dominion chose to sell or shed any light on the plans of Steven Held, Dominion’s CEO.

     Surplus Transactions – The family of the late Bill Burnette has accepted $1.975 million for Hyland Golf Club, a venue that’s operated outside Pinehurst, North Carolina since 1965. The new owners of the club aim to transform Hyland’s 18-hole, Tom Jackson-designed track from “a good golf course to a great golf course.” . . . Just months after it was shuttered and described as “no longer a viable business,” an 18-hole, Ron Garl-designed golf course in suburban Fort Wayne, Indiana is expecting a rebirth. The Kosciusko Economic Development Corporation has agreed to buy Stonehenge Golf Club, citing the property’s “importance to what our community offers residents and visitors alike.” A price hasn’t been announced, but in 2017 Stonehenge was put on the market for $2.875 million. . . . Jon Goin, a Memphis-area golf pro, is said to be “finalizing a deal” to acquire Plantation Golf Club, a 30-year-old venue in Olive Branch, Mississippi. Once he takes possession, Goin plans to change the club’s name to Bridges at Plantation.

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