DIFFERENT STROKES

The growing demand for developing golf courses overseas poses challenges for architects and designers alike.

This year, 13 golf courses created by Jack Nicklaus Design, a division of Golden Bear International, will open for play. Significantly, ten of those 13 courses are outside the United States.

Singapore, a compact nation smaller than Manhattan, yet boasting 17 world-class golf courses, plays host this month to the third Golf Asia, with 230 exhibitors from 20 countries scheduled to greet some 25,000 visitors.

Meanwhile, rumblings of an approaching golf boom are being felt throughout Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, the reunited Germany, and some of the nations composing the Confederation of Independent States, where, until recently, golf was disdained as a bourgeois indulgence. Even Switzerland, a land more noted for its schusses than its slices, is pushing its 38 golf courses as alternatives to the Alpine slopes.

North Africa, Mexico, and Brazil are among the other non-golfed corners of the globe that could emerge as the game's next hot spots, according to the marketing divinations of architects and designers eager to be first in line when the boom booms.

Behind all this golfing frenzy lies a tale most intriguing - the phenomenal growth of golf on a global scale that is surely unprecedented in the history of sports.

The worldwide golfing population today is staggering - more than 30 million golfers in the United States alone, with over 16,000 courses on U.S. soil. Even so, thousands more are needed (and being built as rapidly as possible) to accommodate the growing throngs. The shortfall between players and courses in other parts of the world is even more dramatic. In Japan, for example, the waiting list to tee up may be a year or more.

The global boom in golf course construction has been incredible. "I anticipate the increase will be even greater over the next few years," says Arthur Hills, president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, whose 100-plus members and associate members are those visionary landscape artists who are rolling fairways and sloping greens where others see only barren fields and craggy pitfalls.

SWITZERLAND

In addition to its Alpine attractions,

Switzerland boasts links at 38 sites,

including the Golf Club Crans in

Crans Sur Sierre, left, another design

by Jack Nicklaus, right.

Hills also heads his own firm, Arthur Hills and Associates, based in Toledo, Ohio. One of his recent masterpieces, the spectacularly surreal Big Horn at Palm Desert, California, was the home of the nationally televised Skins Game for several years. Outside the United States, Hills is applying his unique designs to courses underway in Puerto Rico, Thailand, and Morocco.

"The Society itself is growing to keep pace with the current explosion of golf popularity," Hills continues. "There are many good, young architects coming along who are spending most of their time working in other countries."

At Golden Bear International headquarters in North Palm Beach, Florida, Richard Bellinger, its president and chief operating officer, and Mark Hesemann, the general manager of Nicklaus Design, recently discussed the role GBI plays in this global expansion.

"Clearly, 70 percent of our design business today is outside the United States, " Bellinger began. "In 1987, we opened a regional office in Monte Carlo to try to penetrate the European marketplace. We saw a couple of things happening there - more leisure time, more disposable income, and a real interest in golf that had come mainly from exposure to American television and to the golf-vacation resorts on the east coast. As a result, we signed 25 contracts for new courses all across Europe."

"Shortly afterward, we started looking at Asia, where another boom seemed about to begin. We opened another branch in Hong Kong in early 1990 geared toward the Japanese marketplace. From that came 19 projects in southeast Asia."

Now, added Hesemann, Nicklaus Design is shifting its sights to eastern Europe as one of the most promising growth areas. "Golf fits right into the new life-styles people in those areas are creating," he explained. "We're negotiating on several projects near Berlin. There are a couple of sites we're looking at in Budapest. A big push is underway for golf in the Prague area."

JAPAN & SPAIN

Left, the Tomisato Golf Club near Tokyo. Right,

the Las Brisas Golf Club in Costa del Sol.

"Elsewhere, China also is opening up. Arnold Palmer did the first course there about 20 years ago. The Chinese asked Jack to do the second 18 holes. Then we did another 36-hole project, with other prospects all along the coastal areas of China."

Nicklaus Design specialists, Hesemann added, constantly search out emerging markets by studying such variables as GNP growth, population, climatic conditions, capital formation, investment - factors that indicate an area is ripe for golf development.

"Based on just such a forecast," said Belinger, "Jack believes that Mexico can become the next big golf-resort destination in North America in the next century. We found that Mexico had not incorporated quality golf into its beautiful natural resources, and therefore was missing the dedicated golfer-tourist who is not concerned about the cost of his golf experience, but does care about the quality of that experience. We convinced Mexican officials that they were missing this opportunity and have formed a relationship with the government to develop golf-destination resorts there."

Other designers are taking an equally aggressive approach in spreading the gospel to a world still sorting out bogeys from birdies and bunkers from brassies.

For example, a list of the projects contracted by Gary Player Design is a clear statement of that company's internationalism. In addition to more than two dozen courses in the United States, the Black Knight logo is found in Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Israel, Australia, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, The Philippines, Japan, and a score of new developments scattered throughout Player's native South Africa.

About five years ago, Player inaugurated the Chateau and Golf de Taulane, a luxurious new golf/tennis/equestrian spa in the south of France; supervised earthmoving work on Club Zaudin Golf in Seville, Spain; agreed to a 36-hole development on Saipan in the Mariana Islands; signed on to design the Suimei Country Club course in Japan; opened a Black Knight branch office in Singapore; and, in South Africa, completed the third nine holes at the Fancourt development and began design work on Goose Valley, with its spectacular view of the Indian Ocean. And it still hasn't slowed down.

The dean of golf-course architects, Robert Trent Jones has been designing and remodeling courses around the world for nearly 60 years. The only architect to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, Jones signed off on more than 450 courses in 43 states and 34 countries.

Longevity has not slowed the peripatetic Jones, who continues to turn out his design. The roster of Robert Trent Jones courses reads like a United Nations of golf: The Bahamas, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Dominican Republic, England, Fiji, France, French West Indies, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, The Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, and The Virgin Islands.

But Nicklaus, Player, and Jones are only a few of the marquee names leaving their corporate imprints on courses around the world. Other designers and architects are also profiting from the international boom.

For example, Gene Bates heads his own golf-design firm in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, while collaborating with Nicklaus, Player, Johnny Miller, and Fred Couples on the construction of the courses bearing their imprimatur. Bates represents the link between the two wings of the industry - the professional golfers who also design, and the craftsmen whose roots lie in the construction end of the business.

ENGLAND

Golf architects Gene Bates, left

collaborates with Johnny Miller

on the Collingtree Park Golf Course

in Northampton, right, which blends the

best of both American and British design concepts.

With more than two decades of design/construction experience to draw upon, Bates says that his work is increasingly divided between domestic and international markets.

Located in an unlikely setting for golf, the $100 million Mauritzberg Slotts Golf Resort near the Baltic Sea city of Norrkoping, Sweden is perhaps his most striking project. The new course, designed to serve 21st-century golfers, surrounds a renovated 15th-century castle that is the centerpiece of the huge, individually financed development.

Bates also is negotiating with private interests in Hungary, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico for construction of new courses in those countries. "The game itself is international," he explains, "but when we work outside of the United States, there often are strong cultural differences that must be incorporated into the design. People outside the United States want their courses to be closer to nature and to blend into the environment. There is a great respect for nature and how we treat their natural resources. American developers and designers are learning from that, and there is a strong trend in that direction here at home."

In many countries, an ancient agrarian way of life continues to influence how land is converted from agricultural to recreational use. In Japan, for example, tight government controls over scarce agricultural land restrict most new courses to steep, mountainous areas.

"Often, that means moving ten-15 million cubic yards of soil, compared to about 500,000 cubic yards for the average American course," Bates says. "And that has made the cost of building a course in Japan astronomical. A $6 million golf development in the United States might cost $60 million to $100 million in Japan."

Despite the high costs, golf has become that country's number-one participation sport, with more than 12 million avid golfers contending for limited courses where fees of $200 or $300 per round are common. Japanese golfers find that they can travel to other courses throughout the Pacific Rim and enjoy a golfing vacation for less than the cost of a private club at home. Consequently, that boom in Japan has spun off into mini-booms in neighboring countries, creating a tourism industry catering specifically to Japanese golfers. Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and, more recently, The Philippines, have been the primary beneficiaries of this growth.

J. Michael Poellot, president of the Saratoga, California golf-design group bearing his name, is another architect whose designs are reshaping the landscape around the world. The new globalism in golf, he says, means the designers' creativity is challenged in "...working with difficult terrain under problematic circumstances and with numerous constraints."

For example, Poellot's group designed the 36-hole Prestige Country Club course in Tochigi Prefecture, a mammoth $200 million project that took two years to complete. "We had to move about ten million cubic meters of earth, most of it blasted from a mountainside." Poellet continues, "Despite those severe construction requirements, Prestige looks as though it bloomed in place and in complete harmony with the natural environment."

Poellet has also designed courses in France, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and two in the Republic of China, including the 36-hole Beijing Golf Club.

At times, venturing into uncharted territory presents intrinsic challenges that defy even the most creative designer.

GBI's Mark Hesemann recalls visiting a new site in a Malaysian jungle where beaters with bamboo sticks walked ahead clearing cobras from the bush. Robert Trent Jones had to have bears tranquilized and removed to remote areas before he could finish the Kananaskis Country Club near Alberta, Canada, while a mountain lion once staked out a claim to the ninth green of one of his courses.

These, laughs Hesemann, are real hazards...