The Week That Was, december 14, 2014

     Tiger Woods is taking his design talents to Dubai once again, and to the same spot in Dubailand where his failed first venture as a golf course architect is currently blowing in the wind.
     The serial adulterer and self-styled media critic has agreed to design the 18-hole golf course for Trump World Golf Club Dubai, the forthcoming centerpiece of the lavish Akoya Oxygen community that’s being developed by Damac Properties. According to Arabian Business, the track will be located “on the same land where the previous Tiger Woods Dubai project was planned in 2008” but will be “a totally different design.”
     In a press statement, Woods promised to create “a distinct and memorable golf course that players of all abilities find enjoyable,” and he praised Dubai for, among other things, its “amazing lifestyle.” Others have described the emirate as “a hotbed of forced labor and human trafficking,” and life there is only “amazing” to those who believe that freedom of speech should be restricted, that kissing in public should be a crime, that homosexuals and people who criticize the government should be put to death, and that foreign construction workers should be treated as “slave labor.”
     The course at Trump World is scheduled to open in 2017. Woods hasn’t revealed his design fee, but he’ll certainly be compensated handsomely for doing and saying all the right things.

     A development group led by David Southworth, a Boston-area investor with an enviable portfolio of golf properties, has acquired Abaco Club, a 10-year-old resort community in the Bahamas that’s been described as “one of the world’s great sporting clubs.” The club’s 18-hole golf course was co-designed by Donald Steel and Tom Mackenzie and is said to be “the world's first Scottish-style links in a tropical location.”
     Abaco’s new ownership entity, which includes some of the club’s members and residents, bought the 534-acre property from Marriott Vacation Worldwide Corporation, a former affiliate of Marriott International. The sales price hasn’t been announced, but in late 2013 Marriott Vacation offered to sell the community to some of its s homeowners for $28 million. (The offer was rejected, because Abaco was believed to be worth only “a fraction of the offer price.”)
     The new ownership group presumably includes some of the more than 30 Abaco members who, in 2013, sued Marriott Vacation and the club’s manager at the time, Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, for allegedly failing to make good on a litany of promises, among them a guarantee to deliver a golf course that ranks among the world’s top 100. (According to Golf Digest, Abaco’s golf course isn’t even the number-one track in the Bahamas.)
     Southworth, a former president of Paul Fireman’s Willowbend Development, now controls entities that, in addition to Abaco, own a half-dozen golf properties in the United States (among them Creighton Farms Golf Club in Northern Virginia and Renaissance Golf Club in Massachusetts), Scotland (Macrihanish Dunes Golf Club), and Puerto Rico (Costa Caribe Golf & Country Club).
     One last thing: The acquisition of Abaco could conceivably doom Southworth’s plans to develop a PGA Village in the Bahamas, a venture that’s been treading water since 2008.

     Alistair Hanna’s death may not spell the end of plans to build a David McLay Kidd-designed golf course on coastal property in Northern Ireland’s County Antrim. Peter FitzGerald, who controls entities that recently bought the 356 acres that Hanna wanted to turn into Bushmill Dunes Golf Club, is reportedly taking a close look at Hanna’s plans, which have been approved by local officials and have survived a legal challenge brought by Irish environmental groups. Hanna, who died in July, believed that the site was worthy of a world-class links. “Every golf course designer who’s seen it was blown away by it,” he told me in 2011. He also recalled Kidd telling him, “If I can’t get your course into the top 50 of the world, you should shoot me.” If FitzGerald decides to develop the property, he can also build a 120-room hotel with meeting space and a spa.

     Some information in the preceding post first appeared in the October 2011 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.

     One of the most scenic golf resorts in New Zealand has secured permission to add a fourth nine to its golf complex. Millbrook Resort, in suburban Queenstown, has agreed to purchase a 165-acre parcel for the addition, which will be designed by Queenstown-based Greg Turner, a former professional golfer. Turner has already worked up a preliminary routing for the forthcoming holes, and construction will be funded by the sale of houses. Eiichi Ishii, who reportedly owns Japan’s largest art supplies company, bought the Millbrook property in the late 1980s and set out to create “the best golf and lifestyle resort in the world.” Whether he succeeded is open to debate, but the resort, laid out on a former wheat farm surrounded by glorious mountain ranges, undoubtedly has its fans. “It is difficult to imagine a more idyllic setting for a golfing resort,” says ISeekGolf.com. Millbrook’s original 18, consisting of the Remarkables and Arrow nines, was co-designed by Sir Bob Charles and John Darby and opened in 1993. In 2010, Turner redesigned the original layout and added the Coronet track.

     The original version of the preceding post first appeared in the September 2014 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.