1 Jan 2011

This article appeared in the January 2011 issue of China Golf Digest - guest column from Darius Oliver

There are many difficult jobs in this world, but to most people mine is not one of them. You see I’ve spent the past few years scouring the globe in search of great golf courses. I am the author and publisher of Planet Golf and Planet Golf USA, the two books taking me to the best 950 golf courses on earth, including every single Top 100 course in America and the World. My first trip to China was in 2005, and I left excited by the experience but disappointed that most of the courses I saw here were below world standards. Late last year I returned for my fifth visit to China, and I am finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. The best courses in China now are very good, and there is promise of even more to come.

On this most recent visit I was fortunate to see quality courses on Hainan Island and around Kunming and Shenzhen. I aim to return when the weather warms up to see more courses in the north of China where I understand there has been plenty of activity. I was very impressed by both the Lava Fields and Blackstone courses at Mission Hills Haikou, as well as the picturesque Shenzhou Peninsula Dunes, which is sure to win plenty of admirers over the coming years. The same is true of Coore & Crenshaw’s beautiful new course at Shanqin Bay, which should be completed some time in 2011. I also revisited an old favourite, the Lake Course at Spring City, and was pleased with Brian Curley’s work at the Stone Forest Golf Club outside Kunming.

But now it is time for the reality check and the warning to future developers. While it is true that the best courses in China have improved noticeably over the past few years, the average standard of golf course here remains beneath really strong golf countries like America, Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. This is not entirely unexpected, given each of those places has a long and storied golf culture dating back more than 100 years. In China the game is still new, but in China there are also more courses being built than anywhere else on the planet. If the general standard does not improve, and improve quickly, then we may find that in the years ahead this country is littered with disused and derelict golf facilities.

The key to a successful golf development is acquiring an appropriate piece of land, and then selecting the most suitable architect for that given site. During my travels I have personally studied the work of more than 150 active golf designers. I’m continually amazed at how poorly researched some of the Chinese golf course design appointments are. Often an architect gets a job because the client knows them, or a friend of the client knows them, or an employee of the client met them once and remembered their name – or is receiving a commission for work generated. It seems a design appointment is rarely made because the designer is the best candidate for the piece of land in question.

The very simple reality is that selecting the best golf architect for any golf project requires sober and sophisticated analysis of three important factors – the piece of land, the budget available for works, and the ambition of the client. It’s only by understanding these factors, and the quality of the various architects available, that you can make a proper and informed decision on who should design a golf course. My new consultancy business helps golf developers by examining these very things, and recommending the most suitable architects for the client to contact and investigate. This service doesn’t cost the developer any money, and the results are an improved golf course that will hopefully lead to international and local recognition and higher yields for green fees, memberships or real estate sales.

It’s important to mention, that no matter what the development or the aim of the client, striving to build great golf courses is a virtuous cause. Great golf courses usually cost less money to create than poor ones, and they also require less ongoing maintenance and redesign work. Done properly you can build a world-class golf course on any piece of land, and expect your course to remain intact, without change, for decades and decades, just like the best old links from Britain, Australia and America.

Aside from the physical costs involved in building and creating a golf course, there are also the golf designer’s fees to consider as well. With a slowdown elsewhere on the planet, many of the leading golf architects are looking to win business in China so the choice for local developers can be overwhelming. The price can also fluctuate wildly, with some people designing courses for as little as US$200,000 and others charging upwards of $5 million. With a couple of exceptions, most of the really talented golf designers charge between $400,000 and $800,000 for their design work. The cheap guys are usually cheap because they haven’t created outstanding courses, while the expensive firms often have high overheads and successful company principals who enjoy making large sums of money.

When you engage a large signature design firm, the person doing the design work is never the celebrity attached to the company, but instead a junior architect with limited experience, or an experienced designer with limited ambition. Neither one is a recipe for successful design. Furthermore, the really busy and prominent signature design teams have a formula that works and is repeated across the globe on all the various projects they work on. This means, when you engage them as your designer they are unlikely to deliver anything original, and often the value of what they do build eventually falls due to market saturation. A much better formula is to engage a ‘genuine’ golf course architect, and if you need help marketing the project then sign up a successful professional golfer to act as your tour player, or perhaps even a ‘co-designer’ on the project.

The last thing China needs is more middle-of-the-road golf courses. This is a great and industrious nation, known globally for its hard-work, its indomitable spirit and for its lasting monuments and symbols of achievement. The golf world knows that China is in the midst of a golfing boom, and few of those trying to profit from the game’s growth truly have its best interests at heart.

What I would like to see is the standard of China’s golf courses improve even further, in order to secure the interest of newcomers to the game, and also make the industry more sustainable. If you look at the best golf courses of the past fifty years almost all of them have been built for less than US $5 million. Some, such as Sand Hills, Bandon Dunes and Barnbougle Dunes cost half that amount. While it’s true these courses were built on perfect golf sites, there is no doubt that many golf courses in China are too expensive, and often the quality of the layout suffers as a result. The first three nines at CTS Tycoon Golf Club in Shenzhen, provide the perfect example of a project where an excessive budget hurt the finished product. The choice of architect didn’t help either, but had the construction excesses been reined in, and the focus been on creating ‘proper’, sensible golf holes, rather than simply moving as much dirt as possible, the layout could have been much better.

While the scale of the Chinese golf boom is unprecedented, in recent times we have seen similar explosions of activity in places as far away as Spain, South Africa and North or South America. There are strong and important lessons to be learned in each case, with Spain and South Africa both having more golf courses now than in the pre-boom days but few, if any, courses of international repute. In Japan and America we see the mistakes of golf construction during the 1980s and 1990s coming back to haunt the industry, with more courses closing than opening annually in both markets.

The reason most golf courses close is because they fail to attract regular players, or fail to win a devoted and passionate following among local golfers. Several hundred golf courses have closed globally in the past four or five years – but few truly outstanding layouts have met their demise. The reason is simple, great golf is enduring. With all the technology available to modern developers, if you are building a new course but not aiming to create one of the world’s best then you are not aiming high enough.

I love coming back to China, and am delighted that there are finally some high quality courses that I can introduce to my readers and feature in my next Planet Golf book. I would be even happier if the general quality of golf here were raised up where it belongs. So for any golf developers reading this column, my message is simple – if you are building a golf course, make it the best golf course possible. It will help the bottom line today, it will help secure the course for tomorrow and it might just help make this beautiful game even stronger in China. Of course, selecting the right architect for the project is absolutely critical. If you haven’t the expertise to identify the most appropriate architect for your site, then speak with the Global Golf Group and we will help you draw up a short-list of high-quality candidates. For heaven’s sake, or should I say, for China’s sake, please don’t just pick the easiest, the most famous or the cheapest architect you can think of. Chinese golfers, and future generations of Chinese golfers, deserve better.

Darius Oliver

 

Darius Oliver is a golf course design consultant and the author of Planet Golf and Planet Golf USA. For design recommendations, testimonials or advice on how to make your golf course internationally regarded, please contact the Global Golf Group

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