The Week That Was, september 29, 2019

     Three years after rejecting proposal number one, Royal Sydney Golf Club has green-lit Gil Hanse’s redesign of its Championship layout. The track, which dates from the late 1890s, has hosted the Australian Open 15 times, but it’s showing its age. Top100GolfCourses.com currently views it as the #37 track Down Under. False starts aside, the club figures to get a marketing rush from its association with one of the world’s most in-demand designers, and it’s already predicting that the re-imagined track “will stand among the finest heath courses and be contemporary, playable, and sustainable.” Hanse expects to get started in the spring of 2021, and the course will presumably re-open in late 2022.

     Pipeline Overflow – Robert Trent Jones, Jr. has picked up his first commission in Switzerland. The 80-year-old designer, who’s worked in close to a dozen European countries, will redesign the 18-hole, 26-year-old course at Golf Resort La Gruyère, outside Fribourg. The resort, which half owned by Chinese interests, will use Jones’s good name to sell what it calls “prestigious” housing, a hotel, an “unprecedented” spa, a beach club, and other attractions. . . . As he fends off calls for his impeachment, the U.S. president has secured a thumbs-up for his long-desired second golf course at Trump International Scotland. The new MacLeod layout, like the property’s existing 18, will be designed by Martin Hawtree, and it’ll be accompanied by 550 over-priced houses. If you’re looking for the business angle on the story, the Guardian helpfully reports that “the existing course and boutique hotel at MacLeod House have consistently lost money since they opened.” . . . Charles Xue, who’s said to be “one of the richest men” in China, aims to build what amounts to a new city outside Sihanoukville, Cambodia. The U.S.-educated developer, who claims to control 12,500 acres, aims to build a variety of housing types, a casino, an industrial park, entertainment venues, a safari park, and a golf course.

     A new owner hopes to relieve Forest Oaks Country Club, for 30 years the home of a PGA Tour event, of its financial misery. Guilford Development Group LLC, an entity led by Terry Lee, has reportedly paid $1.2 million for Forest Oaks, a venue in Greensboro, North Carolina that’s been in business, originally as a private club but more recently as a semiprivate facility, since 1962. Nisshin Corporation, the seller, was presumably hoping to get a lot more for the 224-acre property, which reportedly had an appraised value of more than $5 million. Forest Oaks closed briefly in 2014, when its operator filed for bankruptcy protection, and it’s had gone through several other management companies since. The club opened with an Ellis Maples-designed course that remained in place until 2002, when a redesign by Davis Love III was unveiled.

     Surplus Transactions – For an undisclosed price, Atlantic Golf Management has agreed to buy Cape Fear National at Brunswick Forest, a 10-year-old club outside Wilmington, North Carolina. The club features an 18-hole, Tim Cate-designed golf course. AGM reportedly also owns Brunswick Plantation in Calabash, North Carolina, and it manages Whispering Pines Golf Course in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. . . . With a promise of “a great new future,” an entity led by Fred Layman has acquired Windermere Club, a 30-year-old venue in suburban Columbia, South Carolina. The club, which features an 18-hole course that was co-designed by Pete and P. B. Dye, now operates as Blythewood Country Club. . . . For $990,000, Rich and Denise Walker have turned the page on Oaksridge Golf Course, a venue in the far western suburbs of Olympia, Washington that they’d reportedly owned for 38 years. Oaksridge, an 18-hole track that opened in 1951, now belongs to the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation and will presumably serve as an attraction for the Chehalis’ nearby casino.

     Duly Noted – Golfzon, which claims to operate 6,200 “screen” (or “simulator”) golf facilities in 62 countries around the world, is finding a receptive market in Vietnam. The company expects to soon have a dozen outlets in the socialist republic, and it told the Korea Times expects to have “huge business opportunities” in the future because 60 percent of Vietnam’s population is under 35. . . . The Swiss Golf Association predicts that as many as 10 rural courses in the small mountain nation will close over the next five to 10 years. Switzerland’s golf operators aren’t facing “a crisis,” according to a spokesperson for the group, but they are evidently experiencing a decline in play. . . . The Scotsman reports that the Trump Organization’s helicopter-based charter service has “failed to take off.” The organization aimed to shuttle wealthy vacationers to and fro between what it branded as “the Trump Triangle” – the company’s two golf resorts in Scotland and Doonbeg in Ireland – but the operation reportedly lost too much money to stay in business. It’s worth noting that the organization gave passengers the option of flying with or without the Trump logo.

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