Of the $6 million, $2 million will be pitched in by the city and they’re attempting to raise an additional $4 million from private donations. Thus far, they have raised $2.5 million. The design will be done, for free, by Raymond Floyd. The Palm Beach Daily News estimates that the value of the design at $700,000.

$700,000? For a design of a par 3 golf course? Has anybody ever got $700,000 for the design of a par 3 golf course – ever?

Now the $6 million does include a new clubhouse as well. Must be a heck of a clubhouse, especially for a par 3. The architect of the clubhouse is donating his services and so is an interior designer. And the price tag is still $6 million.

And get this, apparently the course isn’t going to change much.

The course will stay true to the original 1960 Dick Wilson design with minor modifications, Floyd said. The location of the holes will be the same, but the direction of two will be revised.

So, the course routing isn’t changing, outside of changing the direction of two holes, and the cost for the design would have been $700,000? I’d really like to know how that number was arrived at.

I like to do a math exercise to see how long it’s going to take to get the money back. According to the course’s website, the green fee for a non-resident is, at peak time and with cart, is $46.19. Let’s assume every single player is paying that price, the highest possible. In order for the town to get its $2 million back, it will take 43,000 18-hole rounds. That’s being super optimistic too – the average green fee is almost certainly going to be at least half that, pushing the break even number to over 85,000 18-hole rounds. To get back the $6 million, it’s going to take more than 250,000 18-hole rounds.

That’s an amazing number to fathom for a par 3 golf course – even in Palm Beach.

In the good times, golf courses were getting rezoned and bulldozed for shopping centers and subdivisions. Now, the economy is taking a bite out of them on the other side – this time, simply closing down.

As is the case with many architects in today’s economy, the only action is overseas.

Consider Rick Jacobson, a golf course architect in Libertyville, Ill. For nearly two decades, the founder of Jacobson Golf Course Design designed and renovated courses in Chicago suburbs, such as Bloomingdale and Winnetka, as well as nationally. But in the last few years, Jacobson – who has worked with Jack Nicklaus on a number of projects – has focused on a new market: China.

Last month, Jacobson agreed to design a 27-hole course in Hong Kong. It’s his third venture in China, following the 36-hole Lion’s Lake Resort course near Guangzhou and Chaozhou, an 18-hole resort course.

”In the foreseeable future we won’t see growth like the 1990s in the U.S. again,” said Jacobson, who also agreed to design a course in the Italian province of Calabria this year. “Some of the projects were ill-conceived. Some courses were just a temporary fad until they could flip it to a developer.”

The unfortunate part of the current situation is that there must be a lot of architects without work. The list here on EarthGolf contains more than 240 architects currently in the business. Granted, some of them are not in the US and some work together in firms, but with just 80 courses opening in the US last year and almost certainly fewer next year, times could not be more difficult for golf course architects.

Davis Love III, who is also in the golf course design business, had this to say about the economy.

As one of my friends has been saying, he says, I planned for a slow down; not a meltdown. You know, I don’t think we can predict, because what we were predicting six months ago what were predicting in our golf design business what we predicted six months ago we’ve completely thrown out the window.

Now we run them down. Okay, we’re going to project zero that way we won’t miss. So who knows where it’s going to go. I’d love to sit down with Greg and say, all right, and Arnie and Jack who are all in the same kind of business, like, What do you project? Same with the Del Webb guys. What do you guys project? Nobody has anything good to say. I don’t know.

Some of the publicly built courses over the past few years are beginning to see some major pushback. Take the case of the Neshanic Valley Golf Course in New Jersey, a 27-hole course designed by Hurdzan/Fry and opened 2004 and 2005. The county spent over $19 million on the golf courses and now they’ve got trouble as the rounds at the golf course have fallen off sharply. Revenue for the facility is $3.7 million a year, down nearly $200,000 from the previous year.

Even high end courses, like the Tom Fazio designed Hasentree Golf Course near Raleigh, North Carolina, couldn’t escape the collapsing residential real estate market. It is facing foreclosure – and it was a project expected to be worth in excess of $1 billion when complete.

It is likely to be a rough go for the next several years in the golf course industry. It will be interesting to see where things go and how the market will respond to the ecomoic meltdown. As golf course architect Mike Nuzzo points out in this post, it is possible to build a very good golf course under budget. However, it takes an old way of thinking – looking to the property to define the golf course instead of dictating to the property where the golf course should go. It also takes an architect actually concerned about the costs and committed to designing for a budget, something the big name architects have never had to do. That is almost certainly going to change going forward.

This past weekend I got the chance to play Tobacco Road in Sanford, North Carolina. I was blown away by the course – the strategic elements were everywhere. Having only played it once, I can’t even begin to fathom what I missed, which is scary. The course is better and far more interesting than Pinehurst and Oakland Hills.

The day started out finding the place, which is seemingly in the middle of nowhere, which adds to the adventure. Driving between the asphalt mixing plant and other industrial businesses, it’s a sign of the rough and ragged course that’s about to unfold. Arriving at the clubhouse, it’s minimalist – like everything at Tobacco Road. You get a free yardage book in exchange for your address and e-mail. Take them up on the offer – or pay the $4 for it if you’re one of those overly sensitive people handing over some personal information (Or simply lie about your address…) . It’s, to make an understatement, absolutely necessary.

The first hole is among the best – it’s a purely psychological game that architect Mike Stranz is playing. The best thing to do is to take the driver and pound it since the fairway is incredibly wide beyond the mounds. It’s an incredible par 5 – tons of strategic elements. A good drive leaves even more decisions – layup or go for it? Layup isn’t simple because there’s another set of mounds that pinch the fairway at 100 yards. Miss the green right and the up and down is really difficult. And that’s just the first hole.

It’s tempting to write about every single hole – and perhaps that would be a good set of blog entries in the future. Let me speak a little “generically” about the course. The par fives are all really good – incredible risk/reward elements on each one. Heroic elements and strategic elements. The par threes are shortish, but the greens on all of them are either 75 yards (or more…) wide or 50 yards deep. Meaning that they’ll be completely different holes for each of the three pin positions that they use.

Stranz’s mix of strategic elements and routing ability reminds me a lot of Pete Dye. The most obvious are “the shoves” – where a fairway starts out in one direction for a stretch, then is shoved between 20 and 40 yards over. His greens are huge and undulating, but totally fair.

There are no sand traps on the course, which when the starter tells you this, just suppress a laugh. There is LOTS of sand – but it’s all played as a waste area. They play a local rule that you can lift and improve your lie in them. The reason they allow you to do this is because there are no rakes – you walk and even drive through a lot of them.

The course does have some weaknesses, however. It is mostly an aerial game a Tobacco Road – it’s strategic, but it’s also a lot of target golf. You need to be able to carry a lot of hazards – the ground game opens up a little around some of the greens, but most of the greens do not allow for a shot to land short. Many of the greens play uphill too, which is somewhat repetitive. The day I played, it was soggy – really soggy. It had rained the day prior, but around the greens, it was ridiculous. I could (and probably should) have played casual water on five shots around the green. It appears they may have some drainage problems in some areas that keep these places wet. There are a lot of low area where balls tend to collect, leading to some pretty worn out areas. The tees on several holes are too small for the amount of play this course get. It takes at least 5 hours to play because of the difficulty – it can take a decent amount of time to find a golf ball even struck slightly offline because of the number of blind shots and waste areas with love grass. There are a lot of places for a golf ball to hide on this course.

Those are really minor quibbles in the grand scheme of it. The cliche is that this is a love/hate golf course – and it appears that a lot of people love it. I really feel sorry for those who hate this golf course. They are really missing some truly brilliant golf because they think the course is unfair. Yes, there are a number of blind shots, but so what? No, the course isn’t “all right in front of you”. You actually have to use your brain, and anybody with half a brain and even a small funny bone will find this course to be not only fun, but a great mental test.

I debate how to compliment Mike Stranz because he died at such a young age and left too few courses for us to enjoy. Obviously, the loss to his family is immeasurable. I think that the best way to compliment him, though, is to say that his loss to golf, while on a totally different level, is immeasurable. I can’t wait to play his other courses because he was quite clearly a genius of golf course architecture.

(Image credit – skeevo)

I’ve got a couple more tweaks to make on the site and please feel free to give any feedback either positive or, even more helpful, negative. (I know the colors aren’t right on the tables for the architects and photo gallery – those will be fixed shortly.)

I’ll also be making a return to blogging much more often – spring is in the air and I’m ready to wade back in.

As always – thanks for visiting.

CLOSURES OUTPACE OPENINGS IN 2007

NGF has identified 113 golf courses, in 18-hole equivalents, that opened for business in the U.S. in 2007. During the same period, there were 121.5 golf course closures, resulting in a net negative of 8.5 courses. This year’s story is much the same as 2006 when the number of closures outnumbered openings by 26.5.

“The development business has run full circle,” says NGF vice president Greg Nathan. “Developers are now being more prudent about the decision to build, and are doing more due diligence on where to build, and at what price point.”

Closures
Many courses close because of higher and better economic use of land, rather than business failure. Courses may be sold to developers when the underlying land has greater commercial real estate value than cash flow value as a golf course. In these cases, the land may have been unwittingly warehoused by the original owner, then sold by the owner’s heirs as a favorable exit strategy.

A disproportionate number of closures were “non-traditional” facilities – either stand-alone 9-holers or short courses (executive or par-3). In 2007, they accounted for 43% of total closures but only 20% of total U.S. supply.

Five-year trend
Looking at the past five years combined, there have been 678.5 openings vs. 491.5 closures for a net positive of 187 courses, or a modest 37.4 per year. That equates to less than three-tenths of a percent of total supply being added per year. In other words, the overall number of golf courses is virtually unchanged from five years ago.

Looking Ahead
While it’s too early to forecast 2008 openings, given the number of courses currently under construction, we expect the number of new courses built in 2008 to be similar to 2007.

This is not shocking given the over supply of golf courses in most areas of the country. It’s also not surprising given the current real estate market. I would predict this trend continuing for another 2 or 3 years at least. I would also expect the number of course closings to decline and the number of new courses openings to steeply decline.

The reason for the number of closings declining is that land development is slowing tremendously. Many courses that close end up as re-development projects. Those won’t happen as often, taking pressure off courses to sell.

The reason for the steep decline in new courses is similar to the decline in course closings, only at a much larger scale. The majority of new golf courses are associated with a residential development. With residential development at extreme lows, that translates to less demand for golf courses – a lot less.

As I state on the page, this list is not intended to be complete, but represents my best effort to date of identifying the architects working today. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not consistent in my listing of professional golfers. While I’ve included golfers like Brad Faxon, Johnny Miller and Davis Love III, I’ve omitted many others like Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Fred Couples who have courses credited to them, but I feel aren’t really a part of the golf design. I’m willing to be wrong and have them included in the list, but it’ll take some convincing. I’ve included the guy that does the majority (all) of their designs anyway in Brit Stenson.

Finally, a word on Tiger Woods presently being omitted from the page. I have included the person mostly likely responsible for his design projects in Beau Welling. I’ll include Tiger once two things are in place: A course is open and it is shown that he is involved heavily in the design of the course.

If you know of architects missing, or websites that I’ve been unable to locate (i.e. no link associated with their name) please comment or drop me an e-mail. Many of those who don’t have a website associated with their name is because, inexplicably, Tom Fazio does not have a website. To those architects who don’t have a website – for shame!

District officials spent nearly $1 million studying whether the soccer, baseball and softball fields could be built on a lakefront Superfund site. About a month ago, the deal fell through because of cost and environmental obstacles, Petry said.

“We moved back to Plan A,” Petry said, adding that 75 percent of patrons at the golf course are not Waukegan residents.

“Things change. We need to have these fields built. The fields we have are in neighborhoods and the impact has been in the neighborhoods.”

Some interesting statements there without a lot of detail – like the very last by Petry. That statement by itself doesn’t make any sense. What impact? Is the impact bad? Why is it bad? I think the most confusing was this statement by Board President Terry Duffy.

Board President Terry Duffy replied that the decision to close Orchard Hills was not easy and that providing a place for children to play soccer was paramount.

“It’s not about golf, money or anything else,” Duffy said. “It’s about providing soccer fields in our area. That’s the bottom line.”

That’s such a strange statement to make. What was so overriding that soccer fields needed to be provided? That statement doesn’t sound like very good judgment is being used here. Doesn’t exactly follow the mission statement of the Waukegan Park District.

The Waukegan Park District is committed to providing parks, facilities and leisure opportunities to our culturally diverse population through the resources of community involvement, dedicated staff and sound management.

(As a side note, I found it a bit ironic that the District’s website has a graphic pronouncing “The Golf Courses are OPEN!”)

•  Kingsbarns in St. Andrews, Scotland
• The Golf Club in Ohio
• Double Eagle in Ohio
• Bayonne in New Jersey

Thanks to Chris Kane, David Whitmer and Raphael Larson for sharing their photos.

Play Golf America – Patriot Golf Day