Bobby Weed is brainstorming. You can tell he's brainstorming because he's sprawled in a chair with his feet up on a big design table, his hands locked behind his head. If he had a cigarette dangling from his lips you'd think of Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. If he had a tumbler of bourbon within reach, you'd think of Paul Newman in The Verdict.
"Ten years ago," Weed says in his Carolina drawl, "you could just walk into a room, lay out your brand, and say, ‘I'm going to help you sell lots.' " He smiles wanly, remembering the halcyon days when residential developers handed out six- and sevenfigure design contracts as though they were business cards. "But that don't fly any more. Golf has such a black eye today that developers are looking for every reason not to build a golf course."
It's a Friday morning at Bobby Weed Golf Design in Ponte Vedra, Fla. Outside, the occasional panel van or SUV pulls in or out of the striped spaces; twisty coconut palms wave in the wind above rooftops. Inside, it feels a lot like a realtor's office on a Sunday. There's no one at the front desk to greet visitors or answer the phone. Nobody is feeding blueprints into the flatbed scanner. No clients are admiring the framed photographs of Spanish Oaks Golf Club ("4th Best New Private Course of 2003"), Timuquana Country Club ("Site of the 2002 USGA Senior Amateur Championship") or StoneRidge Golf Club ("Best Public Course in Minnesota").
"I think the golf course design and construction industry has changed forever," crackles a disembodied voice on Weed's speakerphone. "You look at what's happening at Bonita Bay and other golf course communities where the golf operation is being shuttered or closed. Even when real estate stabilizes, buyers are going to have an inherent fear of golf course communities. You know how it is—once bitten, twice shy."
The voice belongs to Chris Monti, Weed's senior design associate. "The bottom line," chirps the speakerphone, "is we'd better not count on building new golf courses any time soon."
Lowering his feet to the floor, Weed rises from his chair and plants his palms on the design table. He stares at the phone. "The day of the 800-unit master-planned community that features a sausage-link golf course routing, that's over. We overbuilt. We exceeded the demand."
It's so quiet in the office that you can hear the hammering of roofers a block away. "Yeah," Monti says.
Thus concludes the Gilded Age of golf course design. Jack Nicklaus, whose reported $2.5 to $5 million design fee for a "signature course" used to be catnip to developers, has laid off staff architects and cut his asking price in some cases to six figures. Rees "The Open Doctor" Jones, who typically built three or four big-budget residential and resort courses per year while mulling over which major-championship venue he would renovate next, now has only one mainland U.S. project on the drawing board. His hypercompetitive brother, Robert Trent Jones Jr., who has designed or remodeled more than 250 courses around the world, has close to a dozen courses under construction in Asia and Europe, but only two going forward in the homeland. A decade ago, the good folks at the National Golf Foundation (NGF) preached that the U.S. would need to open a new course every day to accommodate retiring Baby Boomers and Tigermaniacs. Now they can only watch in dismay as the action shifts to developing countries like China and India, where resort development, rising affluence and golf's new status as an Olympic sport provide more opportunity for growth.
