scotland Two Americans Get the Scottish Open
This year's Scottish Open will be played at Castle Stuart Golf Links outside Inverness, on Scotland’s Moray Firth. The course was designed by two Americans, Mark Parsinen and Gil Hanse, and opened to great acclaim in 2009.
The event will take place in July, the week before the British Open.
Castle Stuart is Parsinen's second golf course in Scotland, and he's already got a site picked out for his third.
His first course was Kingsbarns, near St. Andrews, a co-design with Kyle Phillips, an architect based in Granite Bay, California. One critic said Kingsbarns, which opened a decade ago, “appears so natural that you would think that it had been there for years” and “deserves to be bracketed alongside the greatest courses in the world.”
Parsinen aimed to do something even better in Inverness, on a 425-acre parcel that he once said was “the best site I’ve ever seen,” and he succeeded. Castle Stuart has been hailed as “a golfing masterpiece” that “captivates the mind and tests every element in your golfing armoury.” Golf magazine named the 7,009-yard track the “best new international golf course” for 2009, and Ron Whitten of Golf Digest recently said it “might be the most perfectly conceived and executed design ever built.”
Parsinen makes no bones about his goals for Castle Stuart. “We want the Open championship to come here,” he said in an interview with Golf Course Architecture in 2009.
My guess is that the Scottish Open will serve as a tune-up for the bigger event.
Parsinen's next golf course, to take shape on a site adjacent to Castle Stuart's existing track, will probably also be designed by Hanse, who’s based in Malvern, Pennsylvania. But don’t expect it to be built anytime soon. It took Parsinen six years to build the first course at Castle Stuart, and he’s not in any hurry to build the second.
In recent years, the Scottish Open -- officially known as Barclays Scottish Open -- has been played at Loch Lomond Golf Club, which had been owned by another American, Lyle Anderson. Anderson lost Loch Lomond when he defaulted on some loans, and a members' group acquired the club earlier this month.
canada Desperately Seeking Managers
Nova Scotia wants to sell or lease three resorts, including one with a Stanley Thompson-designed golf course.
The course is the featured attraction of Digby Pines Golf Resort & Spa in Digby, a town along the Bay of Fundy. It's a 6,284-yard, parkland-style track that opened in the late 1920s.
The province is also itching to unload Liscombe Lodge Resort & Conference Centre in Liscombe Mills and Keltic Lodge Resort & Spa in Cape Breton.
“We believe these are iconic properties and have buckets of potential,” one of the province's tourism officials told CBC News.
The province has focused on the resorts' potential because they aren't currently making any money. What's more, the company currently managing them, Connecticut-based New Castle Hotels & Resort, believes that they could use $11 million worth of improvements.
Incidentally, Keltic Lodge is located on property adjacent to another Thompson-designed track, the highly regarded Highland Links Golf Course. Golf Canada recently described the course, located in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, as “a Canadian treasure,” though it appears that the treasure has been looted. The track has been damaged by recent floods and may not open as scheduled in the spring.
Parks Canada, the owner of Highland Links, is currently trying to scrounge up the money needed to repair the course. It's possible that the agency could also spring for at least some of the upgrades called for in a renovation plan created by Ian Andrew, a Brantford, Ontario-based architect, in 2008. The course was last renovated in the late 1990s.
Roughly speaking, Thompson is to Canadian golf architecture what Robert Trent Jones is to U.S. golf architecture. He co-founded (with Donald Ross) the American Society of Golf Course Architects and designed more than 140 courses in Canada, as well as others in the United States and elsewhere. Andrew believes that he's one of the 10 greatest golf designers in history.
“We all look at him as the bar,” says Andrew. “He's the level we have to deliver at if we want to make a statement.”
Thompson has designed two other courses that are located in national parks, both in Alberta: Banff Springs Hotel Golf Course in Banff and Jasper Park Golf Course in Jasper.
india Still Looking in Goa, Part Two
After coming up empty the first time around, state officials have renewed their efforts to find someone who'll build a golf course in Goa.
The state's tourism department is seeking expressions of interest from a developer willing to establish “a PGA-standard golf course and allied tourism activities at one place, either individually or as a consortium.”
Late last year, it appeared that Goa had found a developer, as its tourism minister reported that three parties had responded to the original EOI and that the golf course would be built in Pernem, a town of the northern part of the state.
Perhaps the terms were too onerous. The revised EOI states that the prospective developer must provide the site (a minimum of 200 acres), have at least 25 years' worth of experience in the hospitality business, and have in place “a reputed international hospitality brand” to manage the facility. In addition, the ideal candidate is someone who's already operating a golf course somewhere.
Goa currently has just one 18-hole course, a K. D. Bagga-designed layout at the Intercontinental resort in Canacona. The state's goal is to “attract high-spending tourists,” particularly golf-crazy Japanese tourists, and it believes another golf course would help do it.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Some New Courses You May Have Missed
You heard that six golf courses opened at the Mission Hills resort on Hainan Island last year, right?
My guess is that you've also heard about Greg Norman's new course at DaNang Golf Club in Vietnam. And about Gary Player's course at the Costa Baja resort in Mexico, not to mention Nick Faldo's course at the Elea resort on Cyprus and Tom Fazio's course at Baker's Bay in the Bahamas.
That's because all those courses, and many others like them, were built by companies with enough money to hire press agents and publicity people. When you aim to sell high-priced real estate, you've got to spread the word.
But lots of other courses opened all over the world in 2010, most with less fanfare and much less-famous designers. Here are four of them:
Vietnam. In January 2010, an 18-hole course opened at what’s expected to become Vietnam's largest golf resort. The course -– it’s been described as a “championship signature course” –- is the centerpiece of Royal Golf Club in Tam Diep, a town about 70 miles south of Hanoi. The course was designed by Peter Rousseau of Hanoi-based P&Z Development Corporation and built by a government-run company, PV-Inconess Investment Corporation, to bring tourists and their money to Ninh Binh Province. PV-Inconess controls 1,675 acres where it’ll eventually have some villas, a hotel, a shopping area, a water park, restaurants, a sports complex, and two more 18-hole tracks.
Italy. The 18-hole Mountain course at Castelfalfi Golf & Country Club in Montaione, Italy opened last summer, and the club’s 18-hole Lake course is expected to open this year, perhaps as early as the spring. The golf complex will anchor Toscana Resort Castelfalfi, a 2,750-acre spread in the heart of Tuscany. The property constitutes all four square miles of what used to be a quaint but crumbling Italian village that included a failing golf course (Castelfalfi Golf & Country Club) designed by the late Pier Luigi Mancinelli. TUI Hotels & Resorts, a German tour operator and hotelier, junked the existing golf course and brought in Wilfried Moroder and Rainer Preissmann to design the new ones.
Ukraine. Last fall, Kiev Golf Club opened its “flagship” course, a championship-length track designed by Peter Chamberlain, a Swedish architect. The Chamberlain course, as it's called, has already been selected to host the Ukraine’s first professional golf tournament, in 2012. Kiev Golf Club is part of a 1,000-acre community that will eventually have houses, an equestrian center, polo fields, and a variety of sports-related attractions, including an outdoor pool and a golf academy. Its developers aim to attract what they call “a narrow category of status users,” including diplomats, government officials, and international businessmen. The club has two existing nine-hole courses, the 1,870-yard Park course (it opened in 2008) and the 3,143-yard Club course (2009).
Poland. Question: What do you call Poland’s first fly-in golf community? Answer: Sobienie Royal Golf & Country Club. No joke. The club is located in the village of Sobienie-Jeziory (it’s roughly 30 miles south of Warsaw), and it opened the first nine holes of its Jonathan Davison-designed golf course last fall. The second nine is scheduled to open in the fall of this year. Sobienie Royal is being developed by a Warsaw-based company, Wiodarzewska Development Group, which aims to build 80 single-family houses, 190 apartments, a hotel, a spa, and, yes, an air strip on adjacent property. Davison is an associate at Ford Golf Group, a firm based in Horam (East Sussex), England, with satellite offices in Austria and the Czech Republic. Jeremy Ford, the company’s namesake, co-designed Prague City Golf Club, the first 18-hole course in Prague, in the Czech Republic.
My guess is that you've also heard about Greg Norman's new course at DaNang Golf Club in Vietnam. And about Gary Player's course at the Costa Baja resort in Mexico, not to mention Nick Faldo's course at the Elea resort on Cyprus and Tom Fazio's course at Baker's Bay in the Bahamas.
That's because all those courses, and many others like them, were built by companies with enough money to hire press agents and publicity people. When you aim to sell high-priced real estate, you've got to spread the word.
But lots of other courses opened all over the world in 2010, most with less fanfare and much less-famous designers. Here are four of them:
Vietnam. In January 2010, an 18-hole course opened at what’s expected to become Vietnam's largest golf resort. The course -– it’s been described as a “championship signature course” –- is the centerpiece of Royal Golf Club in Tam Diep, a town about 70 miles south of Hanoi. The course was designed by Peter Rousseau of Hanoi-based P&Z Development Corporation and built by a government-run company, PV-Inconess Investment Corporation, to bring tourists and their money to Ninh Binh Province. PV-Inconess controls 1,675 acres where it’ll eventually have some villas, a hotel, a shopping area, a water park, restaurants, a sports complex, and two more 18-hole tracks.
Italy. The 18-hole Mountain course at Castelfalfi Golf & Country Club in Montaione, Italy opened last summer, and the club’s 18-hole Lake course is expected to open this year, perhaps as early as the spring. The golf complex will anchor Toscana Resort Castelfalfi, a 2,750-acre spread in the heart of Tuscany. The property constitutes all four square miles of what used to be a quaint but crumbling Italian village that included a failing golf course (Castelfalfi Golf & Country Club) designed by the late Pier Luigi Mancinelli. TUI Hotels & Resorts, a German tour operator and hotelier, junked the existing golf course and brought in Wilfried Moroder and Rainer Preissmann to design the new ones.
Ukraine. Last fall, Kiev Golf Club opened its “flagship” course, a championship-length track designed by Peter Chamberlain, a Swedish architect. The Chamberlain course, as it's called, has already been selected to host the Ukraine’s first professional golf tournament, in 2012. Kiev Golf Club is part of a 1,000-acre community that will eventually have houses, an equestrian center, polo fields, and a variety of sports-related attractions, including an outdoor pool and a golf academy. Its developers aim to attract what they call “a narrow category of status users,” including diplomats, government officials, and international businessmen. The club has two existing nine-hole courses, the 1,870-yard Park course (it opened in 2008) and the 3,143-yard Club course (2009).
Poland. Question: What do you call Poland’s first fly-in golf community? Answer: Sobienie Royal Golf & Country Club. No joke. The club is located in the village of Sobienie-Jeziory (it’s roughly 30 miles south of Warsaw), and it opened the first nine holes of its Jonathan Davison-designed golf course last fall. The second nine is scheduled to open in the fall of this year. Sobienie Royal is being developed by a Warsaw-based company, Wiodarzewska Development Group, which aims to build 80 single-family houses, 190 apartments, a hotel, a spa, and, yes, an air strip on adjacent property. Davison is an associate at Ford Golf Group, a firm based in Horam (East Sussex), England, with satellite offices in Austria and the Czech Republic. Jeremy Ford, the company’s namesake, co-designed Prague City Golf Club, the first 18-hole course in Prague, in the Czech Republic.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The Week That Was: January 23, 2011
united states 2010: Down by 61
Final score: 107-46.
No, it's not the result of a college basketball game. It's the number of U.S. golf courses that closed in 2010, as opposed to the number that opened.
The numbers have been posted by the National Golf Foundation, which did its count in terms of what it calls “18-hole equivalents.” The Jupiter, Florida-based trade group notes that our nation has closed more courses than it's opened for five consecutive years.
The NGF also counted the number of existing courses in the United States: 15,890. Of that number, 4,382 are nine-hole tracks.
In 2004, the United States had 16,057 nine- and 18-hole golf courses.
We'll get more disheartening statistics from the NGF next month, when it publishes the 2011 edition of its report on “Golf Facilities in the U.S.”
canada The Quarry Has New Owners
An investment group led by Darren Stalteri has purchased Quarry Golf Club in Ennismore, Ontario.
The sales price wasn't announced. The Quarry features an 18-hole, 6,565-yard course designed by Shawn Watters, an architect based in Elora, Ontario. The course opened in 2007.
“It's a golf course that it doesn't matter whether you're a junior, old, young, men, senior,” Stalteri told the Peterborough Examiner. “It's a golf course that every level can enjoy.”
Stalteri formerly served as the general manager of Black Diamond Golf Club in Millbrook. He sold his interest in Black Diamond late last year and joined two other investors in the purchase of the Quarry.
The group bought the Quarry from Calgary-based Parkbridge Lifestyle Communities, Inc., which had acquired it in 2008.
Watters has designed several other courses in Ontario, including Wildwinds Golf Links in Rockwood and Oak Bay Golf Course in Port Severn.
canada Last Chance for Iroquois Golf Club?
Twice in recent years, South Dundas Township has tried and failed to find new managers for Iroquois Golf Club. Now, in a last-ditch effort ensure that the 18-hole track opens in the spring, it's again seeking help from the private sector.
I have to ask: Will this be a case of “the third time's the charm,” or will it be “three strikes and you're out”?
Responses to the township's call for proposals are due on February 15, 2011. If an acceptable manager can't be found, the course, located in the town of Iroquois, Ontario, will likely be closed.
“The board feels that they want to try, to give it every effort to find someone,” the township's chief administrative officer told the Cornwall Standard Freeholder. “If there's nothing by February 15, the board will have a very serious look at where they're going to go with it.”
The township has reportedly sunk about $200,000 into the course since it took possession of it three years ago.
“At the end of the day, our preference is that the Iroquois Golf Club continue to operate and prosper,” the township's mayor said in a press release. “However, it cannot continue to operate at the expense of other township projects and programs.”
australia Geelong Meets Its Downsizer
Links Living has selected the architect who'll downsize Geelong Golf Club, and his identity shouldn't surprise anyone.
It's Graham Papworth, an architect based in Hastings Point, New South Wales. Links Living previously hired Papworth to design golf courses it hopes to build in Airlie Beach, Queensland (at Whitsunday Springs) and in Madden Plains, New South Wales (Illawarra Golf Club). Both communities have been in the works for several years, delayed by a sluggish housing market and difficulties in securing approvals.
Geelong, which was founded in 1892, is the oldest club in Victoria. Papworth, the president of the Australian Society of Golf Course Architects, will shrink the club's 18-hole course to a nine-hole, 2,400-yard track that he says will “offer an enjoyable challenge to all standards of golfer and at the same time create a premium asset within the estate for future home owners.”
Links Group, which acquired the club in 2003, plans to build 191 single-family houses, 120 houses for seniors, and a “big box” retail store on its 115-acre property.
The club is located in the town of Geelong, about 40 miles southwest of Melbourne.
united states God Save the Republic
Last week USA Today talked golf with talk-radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, the headliner in this season's edition of “The Haney Project.” In the course of the conversation, the newspaper asked a stupid question -- Do conservatives make better golfers than liberals? -- and Limbaugh gave a stupider answer:
I don't know any liberal golfers. I've met one pro golfer who was a liberal, and that was Scott Simpson. He came to my TV show a long time ago with Paul Azinger. And Scott was a nice guy.
If I had to say, there would be no question, conservatives make better golfers. Golf is an individual game. It's about self-reliance. There is no team. You can't depend on a government regulation or a grant or a subsidy to help you. You can't arbitrarily punish somebody else for doing better than you are doing, like liberals do all the time.
There is no question that liberals would have a tough time with this game and wouldn't like it because they'd have to rely on themselves.
How's that? I dare you to print that.
Final score: 107-46.
No, it's not the result of a college basketball game. It's the number of U.S. golf courses that closed in 2010, as opposed to the number that opened.
The numbers have been posted by the National Golf Foundation, which did its count in terms of what it calls “18-hole equivalents.” The Jupiter, Florida-based trade group notes that our nation has closed more courses than it's opened for five consecutive years.
The NGF also counted the number of existing courses in the United States: 15,890. Of that number, 4,382 are nine-hole tracks.
In 2004, the United States had 16,057 nine- and 18-hole golf courses.
We'll get more disheartening statistics from the NGF next month, when it publishes the 2011 edition of its report on “Golf Facilities in the U.S.”
canada The Quarry Has New Owners
An investment group led by Darren Stalteri has purchased Quarry Golf Club in Ennismore, Ontario.
The sales price wasn't announced. The Quarry features an 18-hole, 6,565-yard course designed by Shawn Watters, an architect based in Elora, Ontario. The course opened in 2007.
“It's a golf course that it doesn't matter whether you're a junior, old, young, men, senior,” Stalteri told the Peterborough Examiner. “It's a golf course that every level can enjoy.”
Stalteri formerly served as the general manager of Black Diamond Golf Club in Millbrook. He sold his interest in Black Diamond late last year and joined two other investors in the purchase of the Quarry.
The group bought the Quarry from Calgary-based Parkbridge Lifestyle Communities, Inc., which had acquired it in 2008.
Watters has designed several other courses in Ontario, including Wildwinds Golf Links in Rockwood and Oak Bay Golf Course in Port Severn.
canada Last Chance for Iroquois Golf Club?
Twice in recent years, South Dundas Township has tried and failed to find new managers for Iroquois Golf Club. Now, in a last-ditch effort ensure that the 18-hole track opens in the spring, it's again seeking help from the private sector.
I have to ask: Will this be a case of “the third time's the charm,” or will it be “three strikes and you're out”?
Responses to the township's call for proposals are due on February 15, 2011. If an acceptable manager can't be found, the course, located in the town of Iroquois, Ontario, will likely be closed.
“The board feels that they want to try, to give it every effort to find someone,” the township's chief administrative officer told the Cornwall Standard Freeholder. “If there's nothing by February 15, the board will have a very serious look at where they're going to go with it.”
The township has reportedly sunk about $200,000 into the course since it took possession of it three years ago.
“At the end of the day, our preference is that the Iroquois Golf Club continue to operate and prosper,” the township's mayor said in a press release. “However, it cannot continue to operate at the expense of other township projects and programs.”
australia Geelong Meets Its Downsizer
Links Living has selected the architect who'll downsize Geelong Golf Club, and his identity shouldn't surprise anyone.
It's Graham Papworth, an architect based in Hastings Point, New South Wales. Links Living previously hired Papworth to design golf courses it hopes to build in Airlie Beach, Queensland (at Whitsunday Springs) and in Madden Plains, New South Wales (Illawarra Golf Club). Both communities have been in the works for several years, delayed by a sluggish housing market and difficulties in securing approvals.
Geelong, which was founded in 1892, is the oldest club in Victoria. Papworth, the president of the Australian Society of Golf Course Architects, will shrink the club's 18-hole course to a nine-hole, 2,400-yard track that he says will “offer an enjoyable challenge to all standards of golfer and at the same time create a premium asset within the estate for future home owners.”
Links Group, which acquired the club in 2003, plans to build 191 single-family houses, 120 houses for seniors, and a “big box” retail store on its 115-acre property.
The club is located in the town of Geelong, about 40 miles southwest of Melbourne.
united states God Save the Republic
Last week USA Today talked golf with talk-radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, the headliner in this season's edition of “The Haney Project.” In the course of the conversation, the newspaper asked a stupid question -- Do conservatives make better golfers than liberals? -- and Limbaugh gave a stupider answer:
I don't know any liberal golfers. I've met one pro golfer who was a liberal, and that was Scott Simpson. He came to my TV show a long time ago with Paul Azinger. And Scott was a nice guy.
If I had to say, there would be no question, conservatives make better golfers. Golf is an individual game. It's about self-reliance. There is no team. You can't depend on a government regulation or a grant or a subsidy to help you. You can't arbitrarily punish somebody else for doing better than you are doing, like liberals do all the time.
There is no question that liberals would have a tough time with this game and wouldn't like it because they'd have to rely on themselves.
How's that? I dare you to print that.
Friday, January 21, 2011
talking points Coore Values
It's only been open (officially, at least) for a month or two, but Bill Coore's new golf course in Tasmania, off the southeastern coast of Australia, is getting rave reviews. The most notable comment has come from Mike Keiser, the developer of the Bandon Dunes golf resort in Oregon, who said that it “just may be the strongest golf course built anywhere in the world since Augusta National in 1934.”
Full disclosure: Coore and Keiser have some history. Coore co-designed (with his long-time collaborator, Ben Crenshaw) one of the four existing courses at Bandon Dunes, and he's been hired to design the resort's fifth course, a 12-hole, par-3 track. It could be argued that Keiser's comments about Coore's course in Tasmania are merely marketing hype.
Still, Coore's stock as a designer has clearly risen higher than it's ever been. And as a result, when he talks, people listen.
Coore recently talked about the course in Tasmania, the Lost Farm track at Barnbougle Dunes, with John Huggan of the Scotsman. Along the way, he made a few comments about golf design. To wit:
On the lay of the land: We truly do let the site dictate what we do. We look for sites that feel like golf in its natural state. We have no preconceived notions about par or yardages. We just let it evolve. To us, course architecture is an art, not a science. It does have a technical foundation, but the creation of the holes is an art.
On being pro-choice: We like to present situations where golfers choose how to play the hole, as opposed to us dictating how they are going to play it. . . . Dictating to players is the easiest thing to do, particularly very good players. They love to play holes that tell them exactly what to do, so all that is left is 'hit between this and this.' Technically, they can do that over and over. When there is mystery involved, the decision-making process becomes part of the challenge.
On following the straight and narrow: A lot of the problem is television, where people watch the same courses over and over. They watch professional golfers being asked the same question time after time. They hear commentators talking about the 'premium' on driving the ball in the fairway. So the perception grows that hitting to those narrow spots is what the game should be. But it is the most uninteresting golf to watch and to play.
Here's a link to the story.
Full disclosure: Coore and Keiser have some history. Coore co-designed (with his long-time collaborator, Ben Crenshaw) one of the four existing courses at Bandon Dunes, and he's been hired to design the resort's fifth course, a 12-hole, par-3 track. It could be argued that Keiser's comments about Coore's course in Tasmania are merely marketing hype.
Still, Coore's stock as a designer has clearly risen higher than it's ever been. And as a result, when he talks, people listen.
Coore recently talked about the course in Tasmania, the Lost Farm track at Barnbougle Dunes, with John Huggan of the Scotsman. Along the way, he made a few comments about golf design. To wit:
On the lay of the land: We truly do let the site dictate what we do. We look for sites that feel like golf in its natural state. We have no preconceived notions about par or yardages. We just let it evolve. To us, course architecture is an art, not a science. It does have a technical foundation, but the creation of the holes is an art.
On being pro-choice: We like to present situations where golfers choose how to play the hole, as opposed to us dictating how they are going to play it. . . . Dictating to players is the easiest thing to do, particularly very good players. They love to play holes that tell them exactly what to do, so all that is left is 'hit between this and this.' Technically, they can do that over and over. When there is mystery involved, the decision-making process becomes part of the challenge.
On following the straight and narrow: A lot of the problem is television, where people watch the same courses over and over. They watch professional golfers being asked the same question time after time. They hear commentators talking about the 'premium' on driving the ball in the fairway. So the perception grows that hitting to those narrow spots is what the game should be. But it is the most uninteresting golf to watch and to play.
Here's a link to the story.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Shameless Self-Promotion, January 2011
So what's happening in golf development as we kick off the new year?
“A little Napoleon” has hired Kyle Phillips to design a golf course in the Netherlands. Economically speaking, Gary Browning, a Canadian designer, believes that “things are ready to loosen up.” (Here's proof: He's expecting to break ground on at least two new courses this year.) The president of Uganda believes that Murchison Falls National Park could use a golf course. Brit Stenson and Ron Fream are working on new courses in Vietnam. Greg Norman is working on two.
What else?
Fream is also designing the first 18-hole course for a ski resort in Hebei Province, China that could eventually have five 18-hole courses. The new mayor of a small town in Slovenia -- people call him the “Obama of Piran” -- wants to build a golf course. Harry Colt is serving as the inspiration for another new course in the Netherlands. Joe Jemsek is designing a golf course in one of the world's most polluted cities.
You can read about these projects, as well as others, in January's World Edition of the Golf Course Report. We've even got an item about a British consultant who believes that Ireland's golf business won't get back on its feet until about 50 of its 433 golf clubs close.
That sounds familiar, doesn't it?
If you'd like a copy of this month's World Edition, give me a call at 301/680-9460 or send an e-mail to me at WorldEdition@aol.com.
“A little Napoleon” has hired Kyle Phillips to design a golf course in the Netherlands. Economically speaking, Gary Browning, a Canadian designer, believes that “things are ready to loosen up.” (Here's proof: He's expecting to break ground on at least two new courses this year.) The president of Uganda believes that Murchison Falls National Park could use a golf course. Brit Stenson and Ron Fream are working on new courses in Vietnam. Greg Norman is working on two.
What else?
Fream is also designing the first 18-hole course for a ski resort in Hebei Province, China that could eventually have five 18-hole courses. The new mayor of a small town in Slovenia -- people call him the “Obama of Piran” -- wants to build a golf course. Harry Colt is serving as the inspiration for another new course in the Netherlands. Joe Jemsek is designing a golf course in one of the world's most polluted cities.
You can read about these projects, as well as others, in January's World Edition of the Golf Course Report. We've even got an item about a British consultant who believes that Ireland's golf business won't get back on its feet until about 50 of its 433 golf clubs close.
That sounds familiar, doesn't it?
If you'd like a copy of this month's World Edition, give me a call at 301/680-9460 or send an e-mail to me at WorldEdition@aol.com.
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