cameroon Off-Shore Betting

Africa’s first big off-shore banking haven is set to be built in Cameroon, and it’ll be accompanied by the nation’s third 18-hole golf course.

Emerald Coast Financial & Tourism Free Zone will take shape on 777 acres, including more than a mile’s worth of beachfront, just outside the coastal town of Limbe. It’ll have its own immigration and customs control center, its own port, and its own airport receiving center for VIPs, not to mention an “ultra-secure underground vault,” to be built into the side of a nearby mountain, “for the safe-keeping of hard assets such as bullion and other valuables.”

No doubt, some very high-rollers will be among the foursomes on its golf course.

Cameroon’s government has issued a license to build Emerald Coast to GCN Canada, Inc., a group based in a suburb of Ottawa, and Bonanza Estates S.A., an entity based in Limbe.

Robert Sabga, a former high commissioner for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and the principal of GCN Canada, said in a press release that Emerald Coast will combine “the benefits of a financial tax haven with the attraction of an ultra-exclusive, resort-style, duty-free zone.” He called it “the only such destination of its kind in the world.”

An Egyptian company, Hiram Estates Investments, has agreed to put up $850 million in financing for the first phase of the project, which will include a duty-free shopping mall, an entertainment center with a casino, a business and financial center, a marina that can accommodate mega-yachts, a boardwalk, and a hotel with 250 conventional rooms and 200 “luxury” condos.

The financing for the subsequent phases of Emerald Coast hasn’t yet been secured, but the zone has been planned to include upscale villas and apartments, time-share condos, several resort-style hotels, an arts and entertainment center, a convention center, a medical center, restaurants operated by “international chefs,” and a “world-class” golf course.

“The Emerald Coast project is going to fundamentally alter the way the rest of the world looks at Africa,” Sabga said in a press release. “It is going to change the continent of Africa as never before.”

As best I can determine, Cameroon currently has just two 18-hole golf courses, Likomba Golf Club in Tiko and Mont Febe Hotel Golf Course in Yaoundé, the nation’s capital. There’s also a golf course in Kribi, but I can’t tell if it has nine or 18 holes.

The Week That Was june 26, 2011

croatia Dubrovnik: The Hill with It

The company that hoped to build a Greg Norman-designed golf course on a 1,300-foot hill overlooking Dubrovnik has, for all practical purposes, gone belly up.

A European news service reports that Golf Development Company, Ltd. has dismissed its employees and “decided to temporarily suspend all operations” at its office in Zagreb. The company blamed its demise on “political bickering.”

Political bickering in Croatia. Imagine that.

Golf Park Dubrovnik was supposed to be built on 800 acres atop Srd Hill, which the city has been trying to develop since the early 1990s, during the nation's war of independence. The community had been planned to include a hotel, a spa, meeting space, and other attractions. In addition to an 18-hole private golf course, Norman was to design a six- to nine-hole public course and a Norman-branded practice center.

Golf Development Company is led by Aaron Frankel, a well-connected Israeli arms dealer who's has been trying to build a golf course on the property for several years.

Ivan Kusalic, one of Frankel's partners, once called Golf Park Dubrovnik a “project of national interest.” Last week, he called the closing of his company's office “a cold business decision.”

ireland It's a Long Way to Tipperary Venue

A controversial sports complex, featuring a casino and a golf course, may soon transform a rural Irish village.

Irish planning officials have given a lukewarm approval to Tipperary Venue, which will take shape on 800 acres in Two-Mile-Borris, a small enclave along the M-8 highway in Tipperary County, 75 miles southwest of Dublin. Work on the complex's infrastructure could begin by the end of the year.

Tipperary Venue has been master-planned to include a casino, a hotel, a pair of horse-racing tracks (one of them will be capable of hosting events as big as the Breeders Cup), a greyhound-racing track, a heliport, a shopping area, a replica of the White House in Washington, DC, and an 18-hole “signature” golf course.

The venue is the brainchild of Richard Quirke, the owner of Dr. Quirkey’s Good Time Emporium, a long-established (since 1992) arcade in Dublin. The emporium is no hole in the wall. It’s huge, and so popular that some of the world’s biggest video game makers use it to beta-test their forthcoming titles.

Quirke's proposal worries many local residents, who fear its size, the traffic it'll generate (its parking lot will hold 6,000 vehicles), and the impact it'll have on the area’s architectural heritage. But elected officials believe that it'll create jobs, which are at a premium in Ireland these days. “This is as good as getting three factories for us,” one of them told the Irish Examiner.

A planned 15,000-seat theater didn't survive the approval process, and Quirke won't be able to build the casino until Ireland approves gaming.

You may be wondering why Tipperary Venue will have what's being called an “Irish White House.” The building will honor James Hoban, the Irishman who designed the president's residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

scotland Donald Trump, Out of Pocket?

It sounds as if Donald Trump's golf project in Scotland may be feeling the proverbial financial pinch.

As I'm sure you know, the U.S. television celebrity and erstwhile presidential candidate aims to build two 18-hole golf courses, including “the world's greatest golf course,” on the 1,250-acre Menie Estate along Scotland's northeastern coast. Course number one, a 7,407-yard track designed by Martin Hawtree, is on track to open next summer. But during a recent site visit, Trump suggested that the rest of the Trump International Golf Club Scotland -- 500 houses, a hotel, 950 apartments -- may not be built anytime soon.


“The timing will depend on the markets,” Trump told reporters who assembled to record his pronouncements. As if the press corps needed reminding, Trump pointed out that “the world has crashed” since he began planning the project.

The Daily Mail cites a report from the Guardian in which Trump comments on his construction schedule, saying, “Where's the market? You look at what's going on with Europe, you look at what's going on today -– I look at the Wall Street Journal every day, things about Greece going to collapse.

“I'm looking at all of these horrible stories going out, so you would have really to tell me the market. When I originally bought this site, the market was perceived as being very good. The world has taken lots of turns and twists.... Everything we do is dependent on market conditions.”

And as for the course's clubhouse, well, there appears to be some uncertainty with it as well.

“Very rarely is the clubhouse built at the same time as the course,” Trump explained. “If you build it too soon, you might say, `Oops, we built it in the wrong place.' What we will do is build a temporary clubhouse, then build a permanent one. You want to wait until the course is taken care of and almost complete.”

In other words, we can expect construction to begin next year, probably in the spring. Or am I being optimistic?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: Trump took a few swings on the golf course and declared it was “more magnificent” than even he thought it would be.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

libya Letter #4 from Ron Fream

I was in Tunis in April 2004, hoping to connect to a flight to Libya. I’d been visiting Tunisia regularly since 1973, providing consultation and design assistance to the office of national tourism, to help the nation create a golf industry.

A Tunisian developer had asked me to accompany him to Tripoli. He was looking to build a hotel in Libya, in light of the pending opening of the country to foreign investment. I was looking to design Libya’s first all-grass golf course.

It took three days for the Libyans to process my visa. I picked it up on the morning of the 22nd, just hours before we were scheduled to depart for Tunis. I hadn’t yet heard that the U.S. government had opened Libya to Americans.

Upon our arrival at the airport, after a 50-minute flight, the Tunisians in our party passed quickly through immigration. I was held back as my passport was shown to various Libyan immigration agents, many of whom were seeing a U.S. passport for the first time. They had questions about my profession, as my passport, just four years old, contained nearly 100 pages of entry stamps.

Once cleared, we were met by representatives of the Libyan Golf Federation and the Libyan tour operator who was to serve as the local partner in our development group.

Oil wealth had brought untold millions to Libya, but I saw little evidence of it on the drive into Tripoli. People ran up to our car at every stop, trying to sell us cigarettes and chewing gum by the piece. Men sat upon curbs, holding hammers, trowels, shovels, and plumbing tools, indicating their skills, hoping to land a day job. The roads needed cleaning and repairs. The buildings were dull and bland, without gardens or lawns. Paint appeared to be in short supply.

The next day, we visited a 2,000-acre site west of Tunisia that didn’t quite meet our needs. From there, we made our way toward Bin Ghashir Golf Course, in the hot desert south of the city.

Again, we drove along littered, pot-holed roads lined with distressed-looking houses. We stopped at a concrete-block building that housed a butcher shop. Refrigeration is in short supply in Libya. People shop every day, for their immediate needs. Butcher shops in Libya hang the head of whatever animal they’re selling alongside its suspended carcass, to reveal the meat’s freshness. In Tripoli, at least, it seemed that young camel was the meat of choice. Occasionally we’d see donkey and sheep heads as well. The meat is sold by weight. You just hack off as much as you want.

Bin Ghashir was about 60 acres of rolling sand with a few scrawny eucalyptus trees scattered about. It was the second course built in Libya. Brits built the first, near Benghazi, at the end of World War Two.

The course had 18 small, raised tee boxes, nine roundish, flattish sand greens, ill-defined fairways, no grass, and no irrigation system. A piece of synthetic grass was used to create a preferred lie for shots. Its clubhouse was yet another squat, Arab-style, concrete-block box. Two rooms, no air conditioning. Outside, on a concrete slab, there was a small wood stove where fish stew and macaroni were being prepared for lunch.

The players were mostly expatriate workers from the U.K. and South Korea. On weekdays, the Koreans arrived at about five o’clock, several cars full of them. They’d scatter to various tees in a rush to play as many holes as they could before dark.

On weekends, during the milder months, 100 or more rounds would be played at Bin Ghashir. In the summer, you could only play in the morning. The course has recorded temperatures over 115 degrees.

Over dinner, it was decided that Libya’s first legitimate golf course would be built at Bin Ghashir. The land was available, the federation was agreeable, and water was said to be plentiful just 350 feet below our feet.

To offer an 18-hole experience, I proposed to design a nine-hole “boutique”-style layout with multiple teeing areas, double greens, and common fairways. The track would reach nearly 6,700 yards off the rear tees. It was the same 9/18 concept that my company, Golfplan, had used elsewhere for more than 20 years, to good reviews.

The partners planned to acquire some adjacent land at the south end of the course for golf-view condos and apartments. A new, much-improved clubhouse would serve as the community’s social center.

During May, Golfplan’s team in Santa Rosa, California worked on the design concept. A dramatic layout emerged, with plenty of visual beauty and ample challenges for better golfers. We added several lakes to help cool the property and store the irrigation water.

I returned to Tripoli in early June. On the way to my hotel, we passed the compound where Colonel Gaddafi lives. It was encircled by concrete walls at least 20 feet high, and its entrance was blocked by guards and barriers. Above the walls, I could see the upper floors of several apartment buildings that served as the home of the Colonel’s personal guards.

I was told that Gaddafi lived in a tent in the middle of the compound. He had camels tethered nearby, so he could drink fresh camel’s milk whenever he wanted to.

A couple of days later, in the company of our Libyan host and the president of the golf federation, I met Gaddafi’s eldest son, Muhammad. He was the chairman of Libyan television and telecommunications, as well as the head of the nation’s Olympic committee and the president of its national soccer team. A portrait of his father hung on the wall of his office.

Gaddafi knew of golf but had never played. He was interested in our venture because he wanted to bring tourists to his country. He appreciated the financial benefits that golf-related tourism could bring.

With Gaddafi’s approval, our plan was all but complete. We had a site, a course design, a master plan, and a financial pro forma. Of course, the deal wouldn’t be done until the Libyan and Tunisian sides made some important money decisions -- who pays for what, who gets the profits, who gets the credit. I had my fingers crossed.

I left Tripoli on a hot June afternoon. On the flight to London, over a few glasses of red wine, I again wondered where all the oil money had gone.

Cheers!
Ron Fream

Ron Fream is the founder of Golfplan, a Santa Rosa, California-based design firm. He's designed about 75 new courses, including one for the Sultan of Brunei, and currently has projects in Mongolia, Uganda, and other countries. He lives in Malaysia.

croatia Will the ‘Dream’ Come True?

If you thought the Croatian Dream was just another wild fantasy that would never come true, think again: The project’s developers say they're going to break ground on their first 18-hole course this year, and they hope to build four more before they’re through.

Split-based Profectus Grupa has called its massive mini-city “a true example of an ‘American Dream’ being achieved here in Croatia.” It'll be realized on 12,500 acres in Doli, along the Adriatic coast, and could eventually include numerous houses, a dozen or more hotels, a casino, two marinas, a business park, a film studio, exhibition space for trade shows, an airport, a university campus, a hospital, a theme park, and lots of other attractions.

The first golf course, part of a community called Three Sisters, is being designed by Steve Forrest of Hills & Forrest International Golf Course Architects. Vicenco Blagaic, Profectus Grupa’s CEO, has said that he expects it to be “one of the finest new courses in continental Europe.”

Forrest, who’s based in Toledo, Ohio, has described the track as “a resort-style course that will interest and naturally accommodate the full range of players.”

The track will take shape along what’s been described an “elevated, rocky coastline” that lacks soil. The developers will need to truck in dirt and sand before construction can begin.

The Week That Was june 19, 2011

vietnam Faldo's Return to Vietnam

The people responsible for the biggest and best golf resort in Phuket, Thailand have broken ground on a facsimile in central Vietnam.

Banyan Tree Holdings, Ltd., the Singapore-based hotel developer, is building Laguna Lang Co on a waterfront site in Thua Thien Hue Province, about 50 miles east of Hue. The resort is taking shape on 700 acres in the Chan May-Lang Co Economic Zone, which has a seaport and what’s been described as one of Vietnam’s most beautiful beaches, Lang Co Beach.

“Sir Nick and the Faldo Design team have achieved a wonderfully strategic layout with an abundance of variety,” a Banyan Tree spokesman said, “and we are confident that we will create one of the leading golf courses in Asia.”


Banyan Tree is perhaps best known for having built Laguna Phuket in Thailand, an enormously popular resort with six hotels and a golf course designed by Max Wexler and David Abell. Laguna Phuket is serving as a model for Laguna Lang Co, which will have a slew of villas and apartments, seven hotels (a total of 2,000 rooms), a convention center, a spa, a shopping area, and an 18-hole golf course that’s been designed by Nick Faldo.

The project was originally announced in 2009, smack dab in the middle of the darkest days of the Great Recession. At the time, Banyan Tree said it was betting that the hard times would end by the time the resort was scheduled to open, in 2012. “We think that’s the time the world economy will be going strong, and we will be riding the wave,” the company's chairman said at the time.

The jury is still out on that prediction.

Nonetheless, Faldo's course is expected to open just when Banyan Tree said it would, in the summer of 2012.

When asked to whisper sweet nothings about the course, Faldo paid the usual compliments to his employers -- he said he'd received “a gift” when he was hired to work on such a “unique setting” along “a stunning coastline” -- and he even managed to blow a kiss to the local socialist government: “The commitment of Mr. Nguyen Van Cao and the Hue's People's Committee will ensure that Laguna Lang Co is a true tourism draw for a very special region.”

Laguna Lang Co will be Faldo's second course in Vietnam. These days the Windsor, England-based designer is also working on new courses in Brazil, India, Cambodia, and China.

mariana islands Neo Gold Wings, Back on Track

Two years after its well-attended ground-breaking and a year after its apparent demise, the Neo Gold Wings Paradise Casino & Hotel is showing signs of life.

Neo Gold Wings is to spread over 750 acres on Tinian, one of the three largest islands of what's officially called the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Assuming it's built, it'll feature a casino, a hotel, roughly 800 cottages, a theme park, and a 36-hole golf complex.

The resort was kicked off with great fanfare in July 2009, but a year later local officials terminated the developers' land lease for failure to pay the rent. The tab didn't amount to all that much -- just $173,000 -- but it was enough to put the venture in jeopardy.

A couple of weeks ago, however, the Neo Gold Wings development group initiated talks designed to rectify matters. The retooled group, which now includes investors from Korea, China, and the United States, promised to pay their past-due bills and sign a new land lease.

Once those matters are settled, they said, they'd break ground on the project within a year.

Tinian, which has a population of less than 5,000, is committed to growing its nascent tourism industry with gaming. The 39-square-mile island currently has one casino, and it wants to build three more.

Maybe that's why it sounds as if local officials are glad to have the Neo Gold Wings crew back. “As long as the investment is legitimate and the investor is showing sincerity, I don't see [a] reason to give them a hard time,” one of them said.

canada Gary Player Records a First

Speaking of golf ventures that have found new life, last week Gary Player’s first golf course in Canada made its official debut.

The 7,000-yard track, a Black Knight design (meaning it’s not a “signature” layout), serves as a drawing card for the 900-acre Wildstone resort community in Cranbrook, British Columbia. When he got the design commission, Player said the property was “the most beautiful site I’ve ever had the privilege to design a golf course on.”

Wildstone was begun by Havaday Developments, which went broke in 2009. Last year, an LLC linked to Calgary, Alberta-based Coast to Coast Development bought the property and resumed construction on the golf course.

“It has been a long road, and there were times we didn't think this day would come,” Scott Ferrell, the president of Player's design firm, said at the unveiling.

Havaday planned to build two 18-hole tracks at Wildstone, but Coast to Coast is content to stick with one.

united states Strange Bedfellows, Indeed


Once a month, please, gentlemen.

Shameless Self-Promotion, june 2011

Match the comment and the person who said it:

A. “The Chinese certainly like to do things big.”

B. “Cuba is where Vietnam was 15 years ago.”

C. “What they need is courses that are playable and fun, so that you want to come back time and again.”

D. “This truly will be golf on a grand scale, and in a magnificent, stage-like setting.”

E. “We have been able to find exciting golf holes that were already there, waiting to be discovered.”

1. Nick Faldo, a British golf designer

2. Sergio Garcia, the golf pro and “signature” course designer

3. Rick Jacobson, a golf architect based in suburban Chicago

4. Richard Mandell, a golf architect based in Pinehurst, North Carolina

5. Chris Nicholas, a Canadian developer

The answers: A. Mandell, B. Nicholas, C. Jacobson, D. Faldo, E. Garcia.

As you may have guessed, these comments were made in five stories published in June's World Edition of the Golf Course Report. They were said, respectively, in reports about Mandell's close encounters with prospective clients in China, a planned 36-hole golf complex in Cuba, Jacobson's ever-growing Chinese golf portfolio, the Rio de Janeiro International Golf Club in Brazil, and the course Garcia is co-designing with Bret Stinson of IMG.

June's World Edition also has the low-down on new courses, additions to existing courses, and significant renovations in England, India, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, St. Thomas, and Singapore.

If you'd like to take a gander at the World Edition for yourself, give me a call at 301/680-9460 or send an e-mail to me at WorldEdition@aol.com.

india Letter #3 from Ron Fream

India is missing an opportunity.

The nation needs to re-brand and re-focus golf not as a private enclave of restricted access for the fortunate few but as a unique destination, one that offers memorable courses for both local golfers and international visitors, on a pay-and-play basis.

As Thailand has proved, easily accessible golf courses well-suited to tourists can attract more than a million visitors a year. The accompanying economic benefits are huge, and India desperately needs them.

International golf tour operators currently avoid India, due to a lack of suitable destinations. But some areas of India have great potential for tourist golf.

In particular, I'm thinking of northeastern India -- Sikkim, Assam, Maghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh, the eastern states that border the Himalayas. These states are full of wonderful old colonial-era, tea-garden and hill station courses that would be attractive to vacationing golfers, not to mention unique settings where stunning new courses could be built. The region's scenery, geography, architecture, history, climatic diversity, natural vegetation -- all offer a distinct contrast from the courses in the main metro areas of India.

And most importantly, in these areas land and water can be made available for golf without civil disruption.

Assam, for example, has about 20 ancient golf courses hidden among its tea garden estates, most of them hardly utilized. Some of these tea garden courses are more than 100 years old. Jorhat Gymkhana Golf Club dates its golf from 1876 and is second to Royal Calcutta Golf Club as the oldest course in the country. It's the fourth-oldest course outside the United Kingdom, after Royal Calcutta and two courses in New Zealand. Shillong Golf Course is also among the oldest, dating to 1878, and Digboi Golf Course traces its origins to 1888. Doomdooma Golf Club built its course in 1895.

Sadly, however, these courses aren't easily accessible today. But as India builds better roads and more airports, the Northeast's historic courses could be very attractive to foreign golfers seeking a one-of-a-kind experience.

Experience shows that demand will grow. Golf tourism can be a locomotive for local employment and social betterment.

Cheers!
Ron Fream

Ron Fream is the founder of GolfPlan, a Santa Rosa, California-based design firm. He's designed about 75 new courses, including one for the Sultan of Brunei, and he currently has projects in Mongolia, Uganda, and other countries. He lives in Malaysia.

china Doctor Without Borders

The grand opening of Rees Jones’ first golf course in China has been delayed, but the Open Doctor is already thinking about his next patient in the People’s Republic.

Jones let the cat out of the bag earlier this year, when he said that he has a project “in Beijing, starting next year,” during an interview with Met Golfer.

“He shouldn’t have said that,” says Greg Muirhead, an associate in Jones’ Montclair, New Jersey-based firm.

Muirhead won’t provide any details, but he says that the work in Beijing involves a complete redesign of an existing course. The reconstruction begins this year, and the already-closed track is expected to reopen in the fall of 2012 or spring of 2013.

As for the course Jones is willing to talk about, it has a new name -– Yunling Golf & Spa Resort -– and it’s taking shape outside Kunming, in Yunnan Province.

It also has a new opening date: Spring 2012.

Muirhead says the course will be the centerpiece of a private community with single-family houses and villas, a boutique hotel, a spa, and a retail/commercial area, all of which have yet to be built.

The track will stretch to 7,400 yards, but Muirhead, its co-designer, believes its length shouldn't concern golfers. “Because of the altitude and elevation,” he believes, “it’ll play shorter.”

Yunling’s developers, a group called Golf Travel & Recreation, plan to add a third nine if demand warrants it.

The Week That Was: June 12, 2011

brazil Nicklaus Flexes His Muscle

Jack Nicklaus is putting the squeeze, both emotional and economic, on the organizers of the golf event at the 2016 Olympics.

“The future of the game of golf hinges on what happens on this project,” he announced during a press conference at the Memorial Tournament.

In other words, the Olympic organizers aren't merely choosing a designer for a golf course. They're making what amounts to a make-it or break-it decision for an entire industry, the repercussions of which will be felt forever.

No pressure, though.

Nicklaus is, of course, one of the celebrity designers who hopes to win the commission to design the Olympics' course. If selected, he plans to co-design the track with Annika Sorenstam.

Nicklaus has already upped the ante once, when he revealed that he and Sorenstam would waive their design fee if they get the job. Now he's raised the stakes again, considerably this time.

His message: The 2016 Olympics will be a supreme showcase for golf. Because so many eyes will be focused on this grand stage, the competition will provide golf with what just may be its last, best chance to grow the game in Brazil, India, China, and other nations where it doesn't yet have a firm foothold. If the event in Rio de Janeiro isn't a complete and unqualified success, he's suggesting, it'll be remembered as nothing more than a glorious lost opportunity.

And the only way to ensure success, presumably, is to hire the right architect for the golf course.

“They better put their best foot forward,” Nicklaus warned.

When Nicklaus talks, people listen. But is he talking sense, or just blowing hot air?

hungary Birdland's Sad Song

Hungary's first 18-hole, championship-length golf course is for sale.

Birdland Golf & Country Club, in western Hungary, opened in 1991. It's not the nation's first 18-hole course -- Magyar Golf Club in Kisoroszi, which features a 6,397-yard track, opened in 1980 -- but it appears to be the longest, at 6,948 yards.

The course occupies 200 acres adjacent to the former Birdland Golf & Spa Resort Hotel in Bukfurdo. (The property is now known as Greenfield Hotel Golf + Spa.) It's reportedly complemented by a nine-hole “academy” course.

Asking price: Just under $5.4 million, presuming the currency converter I've got for the Hungarian forint is accurate.

As best I can determine, Birdland was developed by János Palotàs, operating through a group called Hungaria Golf Ingatlanforgalmazo-Fejleszto es Uzemelteto Kft. I don't know how or why, but the company went belly up and was liquidated in the summer of 2010.

Most sources don't list a designer for Birdland's course. I found a website that credits the Hauser brothers, who are also responsible for a nine-hole course in Hungary (at the Princess Palace Hotel in Kossuth) as well as a nine-hole course in Austria.

In all, Hungary has nine 18-hole courses. At least three of them -- Boya Eagle Golf & Country Club in Vamospercs, Polus Palace Golf Club in Kadar, and Royal Balaton Golf & Yacht Club in Balatonudvari -- have been built since the turn of the century.

around the world Where's the Money?

It's often said that the rich are different from the rest of us. Now we can add a corollary to that maxim: Their numbers are growing.

According to a study by Boston Consulting Group, the number of millionaires on the planet grew by 12.2 percent last year, to about 12.5 million. Those 12.5 million millionaires represent less than 1 percent of the world's households, but they control 39 percent of its money.

“2010 was a damn good year for global wealth,” noted one of Boston Consulting's partners in a comment reported by Forbes. “Global wealth is at an all time-high.”

Boston Consulting reports that the largest concentration of millionaires can be found in Singapore, Switzerland, Qatar, Hong Kong, and Kuwait. However, the largest number of millionaires live in the good old USA. In 2010, our nation boasted 5.22 million millionaires (that's 4.5 percent of U.S. households), up from 4.75 million in 2009 and up from 4.14 million in 2005.

Of course, when it comes to wealth, the real comer is China. There are now 1.11 million millionaire households in the People's Republic, nearly one-third more than the 850,000 counted in 2009 and nearly three times the 410,000 counted in 2005.

If you're wondering where the wealthy go from here, well, Boston Consulting predicts that they'll continue to get richer. The firm expects overall global wealth to grow at a compound annual rate of 5.9 percent through 2015.

The wealth will grow fastest, Boston Consulting says, in emerging markets, particularly in India (18 percent) and China (14 percent).

worth reading Viva Las Vegas!

In recent years, the golf business has really taken its lumps -- deservedly so, in some cases. But every once in a while, golf does something phenomenally right. And when that happens, we need to promote our successes.

A case in point: Golf courses in Las Vegas, or at least some of them, are using less water than ever. This is good for their bottom lines and, ultimately, good for the planet. And I haven't heard a word of complaint from any golfers.

The following article, which I found in Fast Company, was adapted from Charles Fishman's The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.

This is good news. Spread the word.

Fact: A single, 18-hole round of golf at a typical Las Vegas golf course requires 2,507 gallons of water.

That's not “virtual water,” it's the actual amount of water that has to be sprinklered onto the golf course to get it ready, each night, for each golfer.

What this means is that every time a golfer steps to a tee in Las Vegas, that one hole required 139 gallons of water to prepare, just for that one golfer that day. That means that a foursome in Las Vegas, playing 18 holes, will use as much water as typical family in the U.S. uses in a month.

Pause and consider what the driest city in America, Las Vegas, has to tell us about golf and water, sustainability, and the reality of changing water habits.

Golf is, somewhat oddly, one of the attractions of Las Vegas. Las Vegas has 61 golf courses. That's three times the number of golf courses that Orlando has -- and Orlando gets one-third more visitors.

More to the point, Las Vegas is literally the driest city of the 280 largest cities in the U.S. -- it gets just 4.5 inches of rain a year. Orlando gets a foot of rain for every inch Las Vegas gets.

To make golf possible in Las Vegas, you have to irrigate the dusty soil with the same amount of water that California's Imperial Valley requires to grow much of the nation's winter vegetable crop.

But if the water-requirement for Las Vegas golf courses is astonishing, it actually contains some good news.

Every golf course in Las Vegas now functions under a mandatory water budget strictly limiting the amount of water they are allowed to use. The numbers above come from a progressively managed public course named Angel Park, and they represent a breakthrough, at least in golf terms. As recently as 1996, Angel Park was using 644 million gallons of purified drinking water a year on its fairways and greens -- enough water for a town of 12,000 people. Today, because of new water management techniques, and because Angel Park has been re-landscaped to give it more of a desert feel, the course is using only 376 million gallons of water a year -- a 40 percent cut.

And all the water Angel Park uses comes right from a waste-water treatment plant -- it's re-use water, not drinking water from Lake Mead.

So while all the golf courses in the desert are hardly an example of “sustainability” in the big picture, in water-use terms a golf course that uses 1 million gallons a day of purified sewage instead of 2 million gallons a day of drinking water represents a huge leap. For all the water ostentatiousness of Las Vegas' Strip -- with the Fountains at the Bellagio, the replica of New York harbor at New York New York, the canals where you can ride a gondola (indoors or out) at the Venetian -- the progress on water use in Las Vegas has been dramatic, and largely unnnoticed. . . .

And yes, even as Las Vegas has been growing as fast as any place in the U.S., the water supply has not. Virtually all of Las Vegas' water comes from Lake Mead, and Las Vegas is strictly limited by federal rules as to how much water it can take each year.

While the city has tripled in size, it hasn't added any new sources of water. Indeed, Lake Mead, in the midst of a years-long dry spell, is more than half empty.

How has Las Vegas pulled it off, then?

Las Vegas has become one of the most water-smart cities in the country -- perhaps the most water smart. . . .

It's illegal now to have a front lawn in any new home in Las Vegas. The water authority will pay people who already have lawns to take them out -- $40,000 an acre -- and replace them with native desert landscaping. They pay golf courses to do the same thing.

It is illegal to let your sprinkler spray water on a sidewalk or street, and Las Vegas specifies the kind of hose nozzle you can use to wash your car (trigger style, so it doesn't simply pour water out when you're not using it).

And a determined recycling effort has produced pioneering results: the Las Vegas metro area now collects, cleans, and recycles to Lake Mead 94 percent of all water that hits a drain anywhere in the city. Essentially, the only water that isn't directly recycled back to the source is the water used outdoors.

No city in the U.S. matches that.

In the last 20 years, per-capita water use in Las Vegas for all purposes has fallen 108 gallons a day, from 348 gallons per person a day to 240 gallons.

You don't accomplish that by turning off the water while you brush your teeth (although that helps). You have to fundamentally change people's approach and attitude about water.

In the last 10 years, Las Vegas has grown by 50 percent in population, but the actual use of water hasn't changed at all. The conservation has, in fact, enabled the growth.

Golf courses notwithstanding, that's a lesson every city in the U.S. can learn.

china Big Brother Is Watching

As you’ve probably heard, China’s central government is again cracking down on golf development as part of its continuing attempt to preserve farm land and conserve water. So once again it's time to ask the obvious question: Will this new get-tough policy and stricter construction oversight put a chill on golf development?

Brian Curley, one of the headliners at Scottsdale, Arizona-based Schmidt Curley Golf Design, doesn’t think so. If a slow-down occurs, he says, it won’t come about as a result of government intervention but rather as a result of free-market principles -- a simple matter of supply outstripping demand.

“There are a lot of moving parts in China,” says Curley. “It’s hard to predict who’ll pick up some clubs and start to play. It’s not like building condos, where you know the number of people in an area and can predict the number of units needed. With golf, it’s about people taking up a sport that they didn’t play last year.”

Officially speaking, of course, a moratorium on golf construction in the People’s Republic has been in place since 2004. Not that it’s caused the nation’s golf developers to lose any sleep. Since the moratorium was imposed, according to the Xinhua news service, the number of courses in China has grown from 170 to more than 570.

How much of that construction has run afoul of the law? Well, Xinhua reports that “only 10” of the new courses “were approved by the government and given business licenses, which implies that most of China’s golf courses were illegally built.”

If only 10 of China’s nearly 600 courses have been built legally, then some of Curley’s courses must certainly be among the illegals. Curley has designed or co-designed roughly 30 courses in China, two-thirds of them at the Mission Hills mega-resorts in Shenzhen and on Hainan Island. The courses on Hainan Island are permitted, because the construction moratorium covers only mainland China. It doesn’t extend to Hainan Island, which tourism officials aim to transform into the nation’s premier vacation destination.

So how many of Curley’s 20 other courses were built illegally?

It’s hard to say. As the central government begins to scrutinize golf development, it may discover that it’s hard to police construction activity in a nation as big as China. Just because a golf course hasn’t been approved by the central government doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been approved by a local or provincial government.

It was recently reported, for example, that the three courses Curley designed for the Stone Forest community in Yunnan Province were built illegally. A government official with oversight in the area told China Daily that his agency issued a stop-work order to Stone Forest’s developer, Yuantong Investment Company, in August 2010. “The company didn’t heed us,” he said.

But what exactly was Yuantong supposed to heed?

Stone Forest’s golf courses had been cleared by local officials before ground was broken, according to a statement made by Yuantong’s deputy general manager to China Central Television. In addition, the courses had been under construction since 2008, and the stop-work order arrived just months before they were scheduled to open. Really, there wasn’t much construction left to stop.

Given that background, how illegal are Stone Forest’s courses –- completely, partially, or not at all?

It’s going to be difficult for China’s central government to untangle such messes. As long as local officials have the authority to approve projects that promise to put people to work, promote tourism, or otherwise boost their economies, it’s hard to imagine the nation’s golf development slowing in a significant way.

Then again, when it comes to China, you never really know. Police states know no bounds. Any nation with a “central government” is by its very nature capable of doing most anything.

For his part, Curley is staying as far away from China’s construction controversies as he can.

“We don’t get involved in the politics,” he says. “It’s not our obligation to check on everything a client tells us or translate every document we see. If I had a job in Seattle and the owner told me he had permits, I wouldn’t go to the planning office and check on it.”

Nor does Curley expect many of China’s estimated 1.3 million golfers –- a number that’s expected to grow to 30 million over the next 20 years –- to lose interest in the game anytime soon.

“The game is new and fresh and in a growth cycle,” he says. “I believe golf is a great sport for China. The Chinese are very social and business-minded, so golf suits them well.”

The Week That Was: June 5, 2011

kenya Nairobi’s Coffee Fix

A coffee farm in suburban Nairobi is being transformed into a golf community that will feature an 18-hole course.

The course is taking shape on the Migaa Coffee Estate, which occupies 775 acres in Kiambu, a township just north of the capital. At build-out, the community –- it’s said to be the largest gated enclave in metropolitan Nairobi –- is expected to have what’s been described as “decent” and “affordable” houses for up to 4,000 people, office space, two schools, and a sports center.

Although coffee farming was once big business in Nairobi, in recent years many of the area’s farms have been lost to various forms of development. What makes Migaa unique is that coffee will remain one of its main attractions, the way grape-growing and wine-making take place at some golf communities in South America.

Home Afrika Communities, the Nairobi-based home builder that’s developing Migaa, plans to maintain almost half of its property as open space, with 100 acres devoted to coffee farming. In addition, the company plans to convert the farm’s production facility into a coffee museum

According to a widely distributed story, work recently began on one of the holes at Migaa’s 18-hole, 190-acre course. The track has been designed by David Jones, a British architect who’s probably better known in North America as a golfer on the European and Senior tours. Jones has designed several golf properties on his own, including Castlereagh Hills Golf Club in suburban Belfast, Northern Ireland, and he co-designed (with architects from European Golf Design) two courses at Antalya Golf Club in the Belek region of Turkey.

southeast asia Tony the Tiger

Following the money, Tony Jacklin has hired an agent to drum up some design work in India and Southeast Asia.

Jacklin’s eyes and ears in those places will be Sylvan Braberry, the former CEO of Singapore Island Country Club. Earlier this year Braberry established Club Advantage, Inc., a group that offers various management-related services to golf and country clubs.

Once upon a time -– 40 years ago, unfortunately -– Jackson was among the biggest stars in golf. He began his professional career in 1962, won the British Open in 1969 and the U.S. Open in 1970, served four times a Ryder Cup captain in the 1980s, and was eventually elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame.

None of those accolades guarantee design contracts, however.

Since he went into the design business (his office is in Bradenton, Florida), Jacklin has been able to put his name on four courses, including co-designs with Jack Nicklaus at the Concession in Sarasota, Florida and with Dave Thomas at San Roque Golf Club in Sotogrande, Spain. Jacklin has also been contracted to design two courses on the island of Cyprus for Dolphin Capital Investors, and his website lists pending work in China, Inner Mongolia, Morocco, Venezuela, and other countries.

“Passion, dedication, and respect were the driving forces that made me one of the greatest professional golfers, and these are the same qualities that I bring to my golf course design activities today,” Jacklin said in a press release announcing his contract with Braberry.

“The qualities of passion, dedication, and respect are also the cornerstones of Club Advantage’s business beliefs, and we feel that we have excellent synergies between the two organizations,” said Braberry.

Braberry will stump for Jacklin in 17 countries, among them the usual suspects (Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia) as well as some decidedly out-of-the-way places (Bhutan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Nepal).

In related news, Jacklin will be making a trip to Thailand later this year, when he appears as a guest speaker at the upcoming 2011 Asia Pacific Golf Summit.

portugal Mother Nature and Human Nature

Next week Robert Trent Jones, Jr. officially opens his second golf property in Portugal, at Onyria Palmares Beach & Golf Resort in the Algarve.

Jones has redesigned the resort's existing 18 and designed a new nine. The three nine-hole tracks -- the Alvor, Lagos, and Beach courses -- now serve as drawing cards for a 500-acre resort community in Palmares that will eventually include some villas, a 172-room hotel, the obligatory spa, a beach club, meeting space, and a NASA-fabricated rocket launch pad.

Just kidding about the launch pad, folks. When you write about by-the-numbers development as often as I do, you sometimes can't resist the urge to add some spice.

Here's all you need to know about the golf complex, and this time I'm going to let Jones do the talking: “We studied the land at great length, in order that the golf course would have the minimum impact upon it. In fact, Mother Nature is the best master and the best architect, so we follow her. Never fight with Mother Nature. We follow the land, and let the land evoke a response to us.”

I won't pretend to understand every nuance of that comment, which I suspect is more calculated than it appears to be and just a little disingenuous. After all, the land may start the conversation, but the designer always gets the last word.

china Letter from Richard Mandell

There are currently 600 golf courses in China. The word is that there are another 100 under construction and as many as 1,000 in planning.

All this activity seems awfully strange when one recognizes that the Chinese government banned new golf construction on mainland China in 2004. The island of Hainan is the only province where the powers that be have embraced golf construction, and then for tourism purposes only.

During my last trip to China, I learned that the government has shut down all new construction until a full review of all projects is completed. The shut-down started in early May in Yunnan Province and was quickly extended to the rest of the country (other than Hainan Island).

The review comes about from the fact that many courses are being illegally built by utilizing farmland, which is the crux of the government’s stance on golf development. It seems like smart governance to preserve farmland, considering the billions of mouths to feed in China.

This isn't the first time a country-wide shutdown was demanded from Beijing. In fact, it has only been three years since the last review.

No one is too worried this will end golf development in China, though, and most expect construction to resume.

With such a seemingly belligerent attitude toward the golf business by the government, one would think that golf in China may be more of a speculative bubble rather than the promised land for the U.S. golf industry.

The bubble is a very good possibility, because the very great majority of the new projects are in process purely to sell real estate. In fact, the golf industry may end up being collateral damage to a burst of the overall real estate market in China.

Millions and millions of new homes, mostly in the form of high-rise condominiums, are flooding a market where just recently a middle-class (much less a leisure-class) has evolved.

As long as the Chinese begin to build facilities that are accessible and can open up the game to beginners, the industry can thrive. Most people point to the Olympics as a motivating factor for China golf to develop, and I agree. Considering that they don’t have a glut of professional sports to attract athletes, many Chinese look to the Olympics as the holy grail.

Now that golf is part of the equation, it's a good bet that development of the game by the central government on the scale of what South Korea has accomplished will be a motivating factor.

Only time will tell if Chinese golf development matches the growth of its population. If it does, then we'll all be very busy for the next decade, churning out 400 or 500 courses a year. But if the government puts the clamps down to slow development across the spectrum, the bubble may burst.

Richard Mandell, a Pinehurst, North Carolina-based golf designer, was recently named by Golf, Inc. as one of the nation's most influential architects. He organized the initial Symposium on Affordable Golf, which was held last year, and plans to host the second symposium in November 2011, in Southern Pines, North Carolina. His Skydoor Golf Club is currently under construction in the city of Zhangjiajie, in Hunan Province. Because the course isn't being built on farm land, its construction hasn't been affected by the current shut-down.