When you’ve grown up in the golf industry, you’ve been around membership sales, maintenance, the ups and downs of good and bad weather, and I’ve made every mistake at least three times. So we’re trying to help our clients avoid some of the pitfalls of golf course design, of construction, of marketing. You know Spain will always be Spain, and Vietnam will always be Vietnam, so there is some very local knowledge that you need. But also golf is pretty much an international sport and we all play the same golf ball – there are some variations in the rules between the R&A and the USGA – but its a game. So you’re trying to build a field of dreams for this game. It is pretty common. A tee is a tee no matter what country I am in. A fairway is a fairway, a green is a green.

Considering that this art is based on a game, there is a common thread around the world. We have a huge amount of women players, and it’s growing every day, and nobody really knows how to put a pulse on that growth. You always tend to think of golf as a male game, but it really isn’t. In our country 48% of players are women. When my mother started playing 30 or 40 years ago (and she is a very good amateur player), we had about 7% women. So its gone from 7% to 48%. And in Japan, when I first started working there in the mid 80’s, it was 12-13%, and now its 27%. So it is a growing market no matter where you are. We have to do things in design, where women don’t hit the ball as far, typically they’re not as athletic, because they often come to our game over age.

It is a big market, and not to get personal, I refer to them as the chief purchasing officers for the family. I mean basically they choose where they go on vacation, and sometimes they are heavily involved in the selection of the condominium. So if we are to attract people to a golf course to buy residential properties or condos or whatever it is, you really have to appeal to this person. The experience that they have starts in the locker room, and it works all the way through to the first tee, through 18 holes. In my mind, as we can tell, we have overlooked that market, not as much as some of the markets, but it is a huge potential market for us. We have Tiger Woods, we have a really huge young bubble playing golf that is in the sytem right now.

Growing up with these newer golf clubs and better golf balls, hitting it further, we have this huge variation of talent on the golf course. So we have to design to accept our customers. We have Seniors, we have Juniors, we have ladies, so it’s really how to build the perfect golf course for every cutomer. That is what we have to focus on.

…And one of the ways that you do that is the five tee system… Five is always kind of a funny number. I remember when we started building a fifth tee. The question was “Do we put it further back or further forward?”.
But it is not only the tee, it is the angle, the approach and the access if you’re walking or riding in a buggy. It is the whole concept of trying to make a golf course move more quickly and use less time. So in some places because of wind conditions you could have seven tees, and in some places where the hole is shorter you only need a couple. So yes it is labelled the five tee system, but when I look at it today in some of the stuff we’re doing, most people are putting the fifth tee further back. But that’s really not our clientel.

I remind my developers that even though we love Seve Ballesteros and Tiger Woods, they don’t pay green fees. They show upto a course for a tournament one week a year. They just slaughter the golf course, and that’s O.K. But you can’t design a golf course for tour players unless the tour players want to own it and pay for it.