Do you think there is room for more golf courses
here on the south coast of Spain?

In a market sense, yes, so long as they don’t out price themselves. I think there’s always the demand for good courses, but there is very little land left between the mountains and sea until you get down to the Gibraltar area. The sites left available in the stretch from around Estepona to Malaga are extremely difficult, and I’ve worked on some of them.

La Cala at the time was the most difficult site I’d ever worked on. If you’re not careful they can become borderline on what is a playable golf course. A course can be spectacular, but not necessarily play well for the average person. But nobody wants to be told that their land for building a course isn’t viable!

The new course at La Zagaleta was an extraordinary piece of land. I and several other architects politely turned it down, but when I saw it I was awestruck at some of the things they did, or had to do there.

I don’t do easy courses, but I like to think that if you play off the right tees, for the most part they’re pretty fair. They tend to be wide - I’m not a particularly good golfer and I like wide fairways off the tee. To me a fairway is anything that is maintained grass, and by maintained grass I mean anywhere you can find your ball. So I like very wide landing areas, because you can complicate life around the greens - but people don’t loose golf balls on the greens. I like to stand on a tee and feel fairly comfortable on the drive. It doesn’t mean you can hit it anywhere and have a good second shot, but you will have a second shot.

There are courses for all sorts of different golfers. I have a reputation I guess of a certain type of course, and I’d like to continue doing that certain kind of course. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a demand for other types of courses, or difficulties. My way of seeing things are based on what I learnt from Mr. Jones. I really am a sort of disciple of his, and his belief was that golf should be a fair game, and I try and make the courses fair to the average player. The good player today is so good it’s almost impossible to make a course unplayable for them.

For example Augusta’s difficulty is not really in its length, but in the greens. I’ve played Augusta a few times, and the greens make it extraordinarily difficult. If you’ve ever played it you can watch the tournaments there and admire how well the pros putt - or you can certainly sympathise when they don’t putt well! Three and four putts are just so easy there. On the other hand Augusta has always been a reasonably easy course for the members in that they don’t play all it’s length, and the rough they have there is sort of insignificant, it’s more of a visual definition of rough. For the average player the greens aren’t set up so fast, and the fairways are very wide. But again if you’re in the wrong part of a fairway you might not have the best angle to the green, and it’s the greens that make Augusta such a challenging course.