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HESTON BLUMENTHAL ON LIFE IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN p12

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MARCH 2012

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INSIDE THE GLOBAL GOLF BOOM

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‘I hope that people will come to see a moment in history’ Deborah Hale, London 2012 torch relay producer

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PHOTOGRAPH RICHARD CANNON GOLFER JONATHAN FROM W ATHLETIC

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Caddie Jordan Garnish of The Oxfordshire Golf Club gets into the spirit of things

[[1L]] MARCH 2012 business:life

BRITISH

WHY CADDIES ARE LEARNING

By Alexander Garrett

MANDARIN More and more Chinese are taking up golf every day and they are not alone. The sport is growing fast in emerging markets from South Korea to Brazil

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*THAT’S MANDARIN FOR ‘GOOD SHOT, SIR!’

icture the scene: a perfect English summer’s day on a beautifully groomed golf course somewhere within range of the M25. As a perfectly executed putt rolls across the green and wriggles into the hole, the caddie exclaims: “Da de hao!”

(Excellent shot, sir!) with just the faintest trace of a Home Counties accent.

At Leaderboard Golf’s courses, from Chart Hills in Kent to The Oxfordshire in Thame, this scenario is set to unfold this summer as the company’s staff put their grounding in conversational Mandarin to good use. Other phrases that might be overheard include: “Qing wen nin de pingjun meichang ganshu shi duo shao?” (What’s your handicap?) or “Yong jiutie hui bu hui bijiao shihe ne?”

(Wouldn’t a 9-iron be more appropriate?).

Golf is going global and no nation on earth has greater untapped potential to take to the fairways than the Chinese, who can even make the tenuous claim to have invented the game back in the days of the Song Dynasty.

China’s golfers are arriving in increasing numbers in the home of the modern game, and Paul Gibbons, chairman of Leaderboard, is determined to welcome them. “We were investigating how we could find some new pillars to support us during the recession, and we became aware of how golf is taking off in China,” he explains. “So we wanted to find a way to attract them to play with us – they are wealthy people these days and their spend is high.”

Gibbons has brought in linguistics expert Paul Noble to teach key staff at Leaderboard the»

business:life MARCH 2012 [[2R]]

learn rudiments of Mandarin and assist the new visitors with their game. It’s early days yet, but Leaderboard has invited 180 Chinese to its Chinese Golf Day at The Oxfordshire for the last three years, and Gibbons is confident the strategy will pay dividends.

Few courses have adopted such an enterprising approach to tapping the new market but, for the golf industry worldwide, emerging markets such as China are set to be the engine for growth in the years ahead.

The number of golf courses in China itself has grown from a couple of dozen at the end of the 1990s to some 500 today, with 150 under construction and 500 more planned, as the game has soared in popularity. A report from KPMG last year remarked: “If only 0.1 per cent of China’s population play golf by 2030 – which corresponds to approximately one-tenth of the European and a hundredth of the North American participation rate in the game today – China would have 1.3 million golfers.” That could mean the construction of 1,700 golf courses in the next 20-25 years.

And it’s not just China that’s getting in on the act. The other BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia and India – are all seeing rapid expansion of their golf infrastructure, while golf is teeing off with a vengeance across the Middle East and is set to cross new frontiers this year in more exotic locations from Montenegro to Peru. Even communist Cuba is joining the club, with plans to establish more than a dozen new golf courses on the island in the next five to seven years.

In these new markets, demand for golf is closely correlated to prosperity, as the emerging affluent classes see the game as a badge of wealth and part of the lifestyle they aspire to.

“Golf is an expensive sport, but to the growing number of millionaires and even billionaires in these countries it’s a luxury thing, like owning a yacht or taking skiing holidays,” says Marnix von Bartheld, a partner with KPMG’s golf advisory practice.

The geographic focus for investment in golf has been undergoing a seismic shift to match the changing economic order. Marc Player, son of golfing legend Gary (see right) and CEO of Black Knight International, which owns his golfcourse design business, says: “Twenty years ago, North America was building 400-plus golf courses a year. That fell to 300, 200, 100 and this year I think they will close 100.”

His company has just opened a course at the Hidden Tiger resort outside Shanghai where more than 200 of China’s new elite are paying £160,000 to become members; other projects in the pipeline range from Morocco to Montenegro, Argentina to South Africa, with just two active projects in North America.

A further landmark in the globalisation of the sport will come with the readmission of golf to the Olympic Games in 2016 (it last figured in» [[1L]] MARCH 2012 business:life

Courses bring in birds and fish, they absorb sewage water and cause trees to be planted

GARY PLAYER GOLF’S GLOBAL AMBASSADOR

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golf tournament raised $2m for children who have been affected by AIDS in China.

Player says that governments around the world are beginning to recognise the value that golf can contribute towards their own economy. “I’ve seen for myself what golf did for Scotland, for Ireland and for Spain in terms of promoting tourism, and emerging countries are starting to see the opportunity it presents,” he explains. “And the people who play golf are often businesspeople, so it can lead to direct investment in those countries.”

More controversially, for a sport that is often blamed for exacerbating water shortages, Player believes golf can make a positive contribution and help to spread the message about water conservation and the environment. “Golf courses bring in birds and fish, they absorb sewage water, and they cause trees to be planted – these are all lessons that can be learnt,” he says. Just a week before flying to Rio de Janeiro to pitch for the 2016 course, he adds: “I would really love to introduce that idea strongly within the Olympics.”

Today Player divides the time in which he’s not travelling between his home in Florida and his stud farm in South Africa, where he breeds racehorses, and is able to reflect on what makes golf a phenomenon with such universal appeal. “You are out in the open air, you are playing against yourself, and the handicap system allows you to compete across every skill level,” he says. “It’s the one game you can play when you’re five or 85.”

n his pomp, Gary Player was renowned for his relentless fitness regime, working out at a time when few golfers did. It was an approach that helped the ‘Black Knight’ to become one of just five players in history to win a Career Grand Slam consisting of the Masters, the US Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship. South Africa-born Player also travelled the world in pursuit of a career that later moved on to designing more than 300 golf courses on five continents, and he claims to be the world’s most widely-travelled athlete, with more than 15 million miles under his belt.

So if anyone could have predicted the global spread of golf, it is Player. “During my playing days I used to travel to the furthest corners of the Earth – I was a missionary for golf,” he says. “I still get letters and emails today from the tiniest places from people who say thanks for coming here 40 years ago. That’s what got me playing for the first time.”

Player says it’s clear the world order in respect of the sport is in the process of changing irreversibly: “The US and the UK will probably never return to the growth figures they were seeing ten to 15 years ago, and in a similar time it’s quite likely that China and India between them will have more golfers than there are in the US today.”

His company has designed courses in both countries, and Player’s interest goes way beyond the game itself: in 2011 The course designer at work at 35,000 feet his Invitational charity Player (right) with one of his senior designers, Jeff Lawrence

learn THE 19TH HOLE RETHOUGHT SOUTH KOREAN COURSES BOAST RADICAL NEW CLUBHOUSES

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here are estimated to be around 350 golf courses in South Korea, a figure which is set to rise to around 600 within four years, and many of them boast clubhouses that are a world away from many of their frumpier counterparts in Europe.

Last year we booked golf holidays to 22 countries, including Jamaica and Thailand

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At The Ananti (above) – opened in May 2010 – where life membership costs £330,000, players are greeted by what Monocle magazine calls “an organic swerve of concrete and a small red tower that appears to change colour in the shifting daylight.” At the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club, meanwhile, the restaurant (below) has a corporate feel and it is no surprise to hear that children are banned.

SHINICHI ITO FOR MONOCLE MAGAZINE

1904) and eight companies are currently pitching for the coveted right to design the official course for the Games in Rio. Gary Player Design is one of those pitching, and Marc Player says: “If we’re selected it would be the absolute pinnacle to deliver the first purposedesigned Olympics course, but even if we’re not there are 60 other projects in Brazil that we know of.” More to the point, he says, Olympics inclusion will act as a catalyst for the development of golf throughout the world: “There are many countries where there would have been no government support whatsoever for the game previously, but now they will want to have a competitive team, and so that support will be forthcoming.”

All this is in sharp contrast to the situation in established markets such as the UK, the United States and parts of Spain and Portugal, where there’s an over-supply of golf courses and everything – memberships, revenues, rounds played – is under pressure thanks to the economy. “In these markets it’s actually cheaper to buy a golf course at the moment than it is to build one, even when you already own the land,” says von Berthold.

In 2008, KPMG commissioned a study from Oxford Economics to put a value on the golf economy of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In total, it worked out, it was worth a staggering €53bn in annual revenues, employing half a million people across the region in everything from tourism and real estate driven by golf, to the manufacture of apparel. Post-recession the numbers may have shrunk somewhat, but golf remains a powerful engine of wealth generation – and some have managed to thrive even in the face of adversity.

Ross Marshall is founder of Yourgolftravel.com, a company that has grown meteorically since it began in 2005, arranging 165,000 golf breaks last year. The company excels at putting together simple packages – accommodation plus golf rounds – that can be purchased online at discounted prices. “Last year we booked golf holidays to 22 countries, which includes the established ones such as the UK and Ireland, Spain, Portugal and the USA, but also places like Tunisia and Morocco, Jamaica, the Seychelles and Thailand,” he says.

In 2011, Yourgolftravel’s turnover grew by 51 per cent, says Marshall, and one of the main reasons is that many players are turning their back on expensive club memberships and preferring to ‘pay and play’, taking their pick from an ever-widening choice of courses and locations. And his customers come from all over the world: “Golf is now Europe’s highest participation sport, and so we are bringing »

learn Three years ago, just 8 per cent of our clients were women, now it’s 14 per cent and rising

clients to the UK, flying Scandinavians to Spain, and so on.” Yourgolftravel has forged its own link with London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies to find guides for Chinese visitors coming to the UK. Unashamedly maledominated and elitist it may be in Shanghai, but closer to home, golf is changing its image – and its demographic. The Nike campaigns featuring Tiger Woods have had a dramatic effect in making golf cool for the first time, according to Marc Player. And Ross Marshall says the days when the sport was exclusively associated with a stuffy old boy network are on their way out. “Three years ago, just 8 per cent of our customers were women, now it’s 14 per cent and rising,” he says. Inspired by the success of young guns such as Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose, there are growing numbers of youngsters turning up at the driving ranges to swing a club.

Nevertheless, too many golf courses in the UK are stand-alone, says von Bartheld, still trading on the whiff of exclusivity that comes with a private members’ club, some of them saddled with debt that was taken on when business was booming. In these established markets, the model of golf business is changing fast, he says, as course owners need to become less exclusive, introduce more facilities to complement golf, and attract a wider demographic than the 40-50-year-old male.

British golf is set to get a boost in 2012 with the opening of Donald Trump’s Trump International Golf Links at Balmedie near Aberdeen on 1 July. The course has already had a reported £50m spent on it, and is set to form the centrepiece of a £750m resort including a five-star hotel and holiday homes.

It is being tipped to host the Open or the Ryder Cup as early as 2014.

And professional competition is already playing its part in taking golf across new frontiers. Lucrative prize pots for events in emerging countries, such as the $7m HSBC Champions in Shanghai or the $7.5m Dubai World Championship, provide a compelling incentive for young dreamers to take up the sport.

For now, golf may still be an elitist activity in Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai, but the 2016 Olympic Games will help to dispel that image once and for all.

GREENS WITH A VIEW FOUR OUTSTANDING GOLF COURSES

Ria Bintan Golf Club in Indonesia is a 36-hole championship course.

The 18-hole Ocean Course offers spectacular views of the sea, which doubles as a natural hazard for the unwary.

Flamboyant American billionaire Donald Trump – whose mother is Scottish – will open the Trump International Golf Links at Balmedie near Aberdeen, in northeast Scotland, on 1 July.

The spectacular Hidden Tiger course is situated just outside Shanghai, and members of China’s new elite are prepared to pay £160,000 for the privilege of membership.

Central and South America has caught the golfing bug ahead of the sport returning to the Olympic fold in Brazil in 2016. The five-star Costa Baja resort in Mexico boasts a Gary Player-designed course.

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[[1L]] MARCH 2012 business:life

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