The Week That Was: October 25, 2010

montenegro Is Norman Number One?

Orascom Development Holding has begun to lay the infrastructure for the resort that's expected to be the home of Montenegro's first golf course.

The course will be the centerpiece of Lustica, a waterfront resort taking shape on 1,400 acres along the nation's rocky Adriatic coast. Orascom, operating through Podgorica-based Lustica Development AD, has master-planned the resort to include 750 villas, 1,600 condos, several hotels (2,200 total rooms), two marinas, meeting space, a village center, schools, a spa, a medical center, and other attractions.

Golf Course Architecture reports that the first phase of the project is scheduled to open at the end of 2013. Other sources say that the first phase will include a hotel, one marina, and an 18-hole golf course.

It appears to me that Greg Norman will design the golf course. Lustica's website includes the West Palm Beach, Florida-based designer as part of the development team, although it doesn't specifically name him as the course's designer. Norman doesn't list Lustica on his website, but he clearly doesn't object to his name being mentioned on Lustica's.

Orascom developed the famed El Gouna resort on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, where it’s building a second golf course, and it also plans to build a Kurt Rossknecht-designed course in Andermatt, Switzerland.

As I reported several months ago, a U.S. design firm has been hired to evaluate potential sites for golf courses in Montenegro and map out a golf development strategy. Dana Fry of Columbus, Ohio-based Hurdzan Fry Environmental Golf Design, who's helping to conduct the study, told GCA earlier this year, “I predict that five or more courses will be built in the country in the next five to ten years.”

australia Ross Perrett, On 'the Beach'

Tom Doak’s overlooked golf course in Australia is about to come off life support, as a new ownership group has stepped up to revive the links-style layout in St. Andrews Beach.

Most everybody is familiar with Barnbougle Dunes Golf Links in Bridport, Tasmania, which Doak co-designed with Michael Clayton and is ranked among the world’s top courses. But in the same year that Barnbougle Dunes opened, in 2004, Doak also opened the Gunnamatta track at St. Andrews Beach Golf Club, on a site that he’s said “may be the best piece of property I’ve ever had to work with.”

Although St. Andrews Beach was immediately ranked among Australia’s top 10 golf courses, the accompanying lots didn’t sell, nor did memberships into its private club. The property was eventually taken over by receivers, and it closed for several months beginning in 2008. It reopened as a daily-fee track, St. Andrews Beach Golf Course, in October 2009.

The property's new owner is a group led by Ross Perrett, one of the principals of South Melbourne-based Thomson Perrett Golf Course Architects. Perrett's partners, according to a press release, are a Melbourne-based accounting firm, the course's current managers (a company called Golf Services Management), and “a Chinese friend who has a passion for golf.”

Earlier this year the Age, a Melbourne-based newspaper, identified the “Chinese friend” as “an Asian developer” and put the sales price at $7 million.

For the money, the new owners got Doak’s course, 20 apartments, and what the club graciously calls a “rustic” clubhouse. More important, they acquired some adjacent property where they plan to build a second 18-hole course along with a 40-room hotel, 120 apartments or condos, a day spa, and a shopping area.

The new owners say they aim to turn St Andrews Beach into “one of Australia’s leading golf facilities.”

mongolia Golf in the Land of Genghis Khan

This week Golf Course Industry magazine checks in with a first-person account of building the first 18-hole, fully grassed golf course in Mongolia.

The course will be part of Sky Resort. The writer, Jim Connelly, is a certified agronomist who's been hired to grow its grass -- no mean feat in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, where wintertime temperatures can drop to 50 degrees below zero and summertime temperatures can rise to 100 degrees.

Despite those extremes, Connelly believes that golf has a future in Mongolia.

“Golf follows economic prosperity," he writes, “and Mongolia’s future looks bright due to the demand for energy, coal, and mineral exports to China and Russia.”

The nation, he says, is “changing from a very poor country into a developing nation that is attracting foreign business investments from Europe, Asia, and America, bringing business opportunity, building embassies, establishing English-language schools, and looking for recreation.”

Some of that recreation is coming to life at Sky Resort, whose golf course has been designed by Santa Rosa, California-based GolfPlan (Ron Fream's company). The resort's ski area opened this year, and a hotel, a spa, and other attractions will follow.

Sky Resort is being developed by MCS Group, a Mongolian conglomerate whose subsidiaries include Genghis Khan Beer.

Connelly's seeding began this year and will conclude next spring.

More Good Press for Golf

While recovering from recent shoulder surgery, Greg Norman didn't play any golf for almost a year. And he didn't miss the game in the least.

“I didn't touch a golf club for 11 months,” Norman told the Palm Beach Post, “and quite honestly, I actually really enjoyed it.”


It gets worse.

“There was a part of my day that I always used to allocate for golf, like five, six, seven, eight hours a day,” Norman continued. “So I had a lot more time on my hands, and I enjoyed life a heck of a lot more.”

Okay, I understand that Norman loves golf. I'm sure he'd readily admit that golf has meant everything to him. And maybe his statement was taken slightly out of context.

Still, comments like the ones he gave the Post aren't the kind of press that golf needs these days. When a sport is losing players left and right, it's doesn't need one of its superstars suggesting that he can live just fine without it.

talking points New Horizons

Here are some comments made by speakers at the recent Asia Pacific Golf Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, as reported by the Bangkok Post and other sources.

Greg Norman: We have to get more players into the game and be increasingly creative in the ways to attract them. Golf has to become more accessible and affordable. It has to open up.

Gary Player: Not enough is being done to get our young to play golf, and if we do not do something radical now, the game will suffer going forward.

Hud Hinton of Troon Golf: The game is too expensive to play, too difficult to play, [and] too expensive to operate, and the pace of play is too slow.

Norman again: There's nothing to say that a golf course has to be 18 holes. Why shouldn't 12-hole courses be successful in Asia?

Player again: Something needs to be done about the golf ball. It is just going too far, and I urge the USGA and the R&A to do something quickly before these new balls make today's golf courses obsolete.

kazakhstan Glorious Nation for Golf

What’s the first image that pops into your mind when someone says Kazakhstan?

No doubt, it’s the clueless TV journalist in the hit movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. But these days Kazakhstan is a lot more than the butt of Sacha Baron Cohen’s jokes. Thanks to the rising price of oil, the nation’s economy is relatively strong and its people have money to spend on Western-style comforts –- including vacations at seaside resorts.


Kazakhstan, which is nearly as big as India, has more than 1,000 miles of coastline along the Caspian Sea, with many potential sites for such destinations. Since 2007, a Syrian development group has targeted one of them –- a 4,200-acre spread along Kinderli Bay near the Turkmenistan border, between the coastal towns of Fetisovo and Akau -– for a resort community that will include roughly 500 villas and cottages, 23 hotels, a theme park, a water park, an amusement park, various sports venues, a campsite, a 27- or 36-hole golf complex, and other attractions.

The developers, a group called Syrian International Business Centre Group, call it the Kinderli Sun & Beach Holiday Resort, or simply Kinderli Beach. SIBC has signed a development agreement with Kazakhstan’s government, which plans to build an airport on 825 acres of nearby property. The parties believe the resort will attract 300,000 visitors a year, mostly people from Kazakhstan and Russia.

SIBC’s executive chairman, Eng Bashar S. S. Al-Atassi, has said that he hopes to make Kinderli Beach “the first sustainable holiday destination of the 21st century.”

Unfortunately, he’s not yet been able to secure financing for the construction -- Kazakhstan's banks have taken a pounding on their real estate loans -- and he spent some time earlier this year wooing potential investors in Malaysia, where SIBC has a subsidiary company.

If you think the golf complex at Kinderli Beach will be a novelty in Kazakhstan, you’re way off. The nation has a half-dozen golf properties, the best-known of which is an Arnold Palmer-designed track at Zhailjau Golf Resort in Almaty. The course hosts the Kazakhstan Open, a stop on the European Tour.

The Week That Was: October 18, 2010

cyprus Faldo Quenches a Thirst for Golf

Hong Kong-based Palmerston Hotels & Resorts has opened the fourth 18-hole golf course on Cyprus, the parched island in the eastern Mediterranean.

The 6,900-yard layout has been designed by Nick Faldo -- er, make that Sir Nick Faldo -- and anchors Elea Golf Club in Paphos. The club is part of Elea Golf & Spa Resort, which will eventually consist of 200 villas, 100 apartments, a boutique hotel, a resort village, and a spa.


According to a press release graciously reprinted by Cyprus Property News, the “magnificent” par-71 track “commands a striking location above the shimmering Mediterranean Sea” and has been “meticulously crafted through dramatic landscape.”

For his part, Faldo humbly said, “This golf course certainly has the potential to play a pivotal role in establishing this part of the world as a leading European golf destination.”

These days Palmerston is hoping to build similar golf resorts in Italy, Sardinia, and Cuba.

I'm sure it was just an oversight, but the press release failed to mention that Cyprus doesn't have any water. Of course, that hasn’t stopped its government from approving new golf projects.

vietnam A Treasure Changes Hands

Saigon-based Vina Properties Development Group has acquired Vietnam's premier golf property, Dalat Palace Golf Club in Dalat City (Lam Dong Province). For multiple years in this decade, Vietnam Golf and Golf Digest have ranked Dalat Palace as the nation's top course.

The club is located in what is arguably Vietnam's favorite summer vacation destination, an area originally made popular by French colonists and Vietnamese royalty and still known as as “Petit Paris.”

According to Asia Travel Tips, the club is “notable for its clever mix of holes weaving through rolling topography that is nonetheless eminently walkable; for its extraordinary landscaping featuring hydrangea, bougainvillea, red salvia, impatiens, and mimosa; and, thanks to the mile-high town’s cool climate, for its immaculate bentgrass greens, a rarity in Southeast Asia.”

ATT says that the club's “first eight holes were opened for play in the early 1930s,” but the club says that its original nine -- designed by H. S. Colt and C. H. Alison -- opened in 1922. Designers working for IMG, the big, Cleveland, Ohio-based sports management company, overhauled the original nine and added a second nine in the mid 1990s.

Along with the golf course, Vina Properties bought a pair of hotels, the 43-room Dalat Palace Hotel and the 140-room Dalat du Parc.

The company plans to give the course a minor makeover -- bunkers will be rebuilt, cart paths will be resurfaced, drainage issues will be addressed -- and eventually build a new, modern clubhouse. But the existing clubhouse, which dates from the 1920s, will be preserved.

“It is too rich an amenity to ever be excluded from the experience at Dalat Palace,” says the club's general manager.

canada In Ontario, Less Just May Be More

Pending approvals by the appropriate authorities, Saginaw Golf Club is going to be downsized and transformed into a multi-purpose recreation center.

It's a matter of survival, says the club's owner.

“We’re a one-dimensional facility right now. You come here, you play golf, that’s it,” Andy Byrne told the Cambridge Times. “We’re two nine-hole golf courses, but the model is not working for economic reasons. We definitely can’t keep going the way we’re going.”

Byrne aims to sell most of the club's Essex course to a residential developer. On the rest of his 64-acre property, he plans to build tennis courts, batting cages, a mini-golf course, and a golf academy. The club's par-3 Vista nine will continue to operate.

Byrne also had a few choice things to say about the dreary state of the golf business in Ontario.

“The whole golf industry is terrible; it’s awful,” he said. “Ten years ago, the industry was great. You could make a decent living and enjoy what you were doing.

“There’s too many golf courses, and we’re part of the problem. We have two nine-hole courses, and you only need one, really, to do what we want to do.”

Bryne plans to file a rezoning application with the city of Cambridge by the end of the year.

texas Robert Von Hagge, RIP

Robert von Hagge, the Texas-based golf course architect, died last week.

I didn't know von Hagge, but the contributors at Golf Club Atlas have been sharing some of their memories of him. Here's my favorite, from another Texas-based designer, Jeff Brauer:

My best personal remembrance of Bob was following him in an interview down near Corpus Christi, Texas. As I walked in, he was saying his good-byes, kissing the two women's hands who were on the committee and telling them how nice they smelled. They were eating it up, no doubt. I had to joke that the only time I told a woman about her smell, it was to comment on how bad she smelled. I learned a valuable sales lesson that day!



Von Hagge was born in 1927, and his entire life revolved around golf. According to a biography published by the Woodlands Villager, he was born and raised on a golf course. By the age of 17, he'd spent time as a caddy and a caddy master, an assistant superintendent, and an assistant pro.

In the mid 1950s, eager to begin designing courses -- his father, Ben, was a golf course architect who'd worked briefly with Donald Ross in the 1920s -- von Hagge went to work for Dick Wilson. He stayed with Wilson until 1962, when he created his own firm.

By my count, unreliable as it may be, Von Hagge designed about 70 golf courses in the United States and more than 50 in various foreign nations, among them Mexico, France, Italy, Argentina, Denmark, Venezuela, Australia, Japan, Spain, Jamaica, and the Bahamas.

One of his courses, Les Bordes Golf Club in France's Loire Valley, is widely considered to be the top course in France. Just a month or so ago, the club's owners decided to build a second Von Hagge-designed track.

In a 2008 interview with Golf Course Architecture, von Hagge said, "I see nothing but growth, for our firm and the rest of the industry, because the world is becoming so small. . . . I think the future is unlimited.”

talking points Adapting to Changing Times

Not many golf course designers have spent as much time in China as Brian Curley.

Curley, one of the principals of Scottsdale, Arizona-based Schmidt-Curley Design, helped to design the 12 courses at the Mission Hills resort in Shenzhen and the six courses that have opened thus far at Mission Hills Haikou, not to mention various other tracks in the People's Republic.

No, he hasn't seen it all. But he's seen a lot, and certainly more than most of us have.


A week or so ago, Golf Club Atlas posted an wide-ranging interview with Curley, who had this to say about some of the differences between golf in China and the United States:

Golf doesn’t have an economic problem, it has a golf problem. Operators, in my opinion, are too slow to adapt to changing times. I was recently sent an e-mail from a club asking the membership if it was okay to bend the “no denim” rule at the clubhouse for one night -- a cowboy cookout theme.

I am afraid that younger golfers will take a pass on golf. You cannot tell a prospective 35-year-old member he has to give up his Blackberry for five hours. Times have changed.

Golf is a great game with a long history and it’s not going away, but, with the quick advances in technology and multi-tasking mentalities, it will need to adjust. I’ve told operators they should get rid of the GPS screens on carts (that you bump your head on) and change it to ESPN!

This certainly isn’t the case for all courses (Augusta is certainly in no dire need to “adapt”), but some courses will need to do so to survive.

Asia, on the other hand, is different. The sport is new and exciting. Plus, unlike the Western World, they embrace combining business with golf. Women play more. Families promote golf to children as a tool to advance in business. . . .

Moreover, golf is a social game, and Asians — especially Chinese — are very social. Americans change their shoes in the parking lot and want a quick round in order to get back to their other responsibilities and family. To many Asians, the golf club and its expansive clubhouses that get ridiculed by the West represent their family/social scene. They are not afraid of multi-tasking. Cell phones are not only everywhere, but you will see signs boasting cell service quality at clubhouses and on first tees.

I am not saying one view is “right” and the other “wrong” -- it is just the state of our world today, and I think Western operators could learn something from how Asian clubs function. China never got the early “rules” of golf and adapted the game to their culture. There is no old guy at the back of the room wearing a blue blazer with dandruff exclaiming, “That’s the way we did it back when Hogan played here.” . . .