Toby Ingleton met golf legend Gary Player to talk about his design business, his concern for the environment and the course his firm is currently building at Thracian Cliffs in Bulgaria.
One day, Gary Player will have to slow down. But that day hasn’t come yet. Golf’s greatest traveller and fitness fanatic continues to criss-cross the globe at a rate that would exhaust men half his age, and his design company continues to thrive, opening courses at a frenetic rate even in the current depressed golf market.
GCA was lucky enough to catch up with Gary at Sunningdale Golf Club in England during July, in the week of the Senior Open Championship. We had arranged to meet with him to discuss the game in general, his own business interests, and specifically the Thracian Cliffs golf course his firm – along with British construction management firm Braemar Golf, which will also operate the course once it is opened – is currently building on the Black Sea coastline of Bulgaria. As clifftop sites tend to do, the property has earned rave reviews from those lucky enough to view it, and, true to form, Gary wasn’t going to play it down either.
“It’s increasingly more difficult to discover great sites, but this one is as good as any I have ever seen,” he told me. “We have got greens on cliff edges and the ocean is visible from every hole. The only other course where I can recall that being the case is Old Head in Ireland. This site is way better than Pebble Beach.”
One of the problems with great sites nowadays is that, because they are invariably funded by housing or hotel developments, owners tend to reserve much of the best property for the part of the resort that pays the bills, relegating golf holes to the interior land. That’s not the case at Thracian Cliffs, Gary told me: “The site slopes down towards the ocean so we could have oceanfront golf without taking anything away from the housing, which still has incredible views over the golf course and out towards the sea.”
Although great natural sites are a privilege, they can also create pressure: no-one likes to mess up perfect land. Gary says the challenge at Thracian Cliffs was different, though. “We have created almost 300 golf courses and we know how to make a good course, so that wasn’t a pressure,” he said. “The main pressure was making this course playable, because if you miss the greens, you can be down in the ocean. At Thracian Cliffs, where nature has already given us severity in the form of wind and high cliffs, we’ve resisted the temptation to add in all kinds of other hazards. The worst thing we could have done was to create massively undulating greens. I don’t believe in double or treble trouble on a golf course.
“The member is the heart of a course. You only have to look at where we are now – the paradise of Sunningdale – to understand that. A great architect will understand that and make a course that is playable and enjoyable for its members. I lose respect for you as an architect if your course is too difficult. It can be tough from the back tees and still be playable for everyone else.”
A journalist’s dream, Gary is rarely short of a pithy quote on any golf-related subject. But his most recurring subject matter is golf’s relationship to the natural environment; he thinks the game still has a long way to go to make itself sustainable. “Things have to change. The world is facing massive challenges in relation to water shortages,” he said. “Fifty per cent of the golf courses in the world will have to find a way to cut their water consumption. We also have to find a way to get around the exorbitant maintenance costs that some of these courses face. My own golf course uses 30 per cent of the water, 30 per cent of the oil and 30 per cent of the machinery of your average resort course.” And he believes much of the political hostility towards golf that is evident in countries around the world would evaporate if the game were seen to be more environmentally friendly. “If we can achieve these levels of water and resource use then it will become easier to get permits to build golf courses,” he said. “I am vehemently against the use of fertiliser – it makes the soil inferior. I have my own farm where my vegetables and crops are all organic. And we should encourage animals on golf courses – it brings it alive.”
It’s not just golf’s environmental challenges that he’s concerned about though. “People are pumping steroids into cattle, hormones into pigs and antibiotics into chickens – this has a massive effect on human beings’ health,” he told me. “In the ocean it’s the same, we’re killing sharks and whales, putting DDT in the ocean and it’s collecting all our waste. A lot of people who saw Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth just dismissed him as a nut, but I’m physically seeing it.”
He believes that it is golf architects, who travel the world and see the game’s challenges in many different regions, that have the best perspective on what golf needs to do. “As architects, we have got to educate our clients,” he said. “The whole reason we are in this economic crisis is because people were greedy. You can have the exceptions, like Augusta, but viewed as a whole the industry has to change. Architects have gone bankrupt because they wouldn’t travel to all corners of the world. I’ve always believed in a strong work ethic and that has underpinned my success. I’ve been travelling for 56 years and you see things and learn things that help you to understand why we’re facing such problems. Like in California, where they are planting eucalyptus trees oblivious to the amount of water they take out of the soil.”
“We must bring new systems into golf developments, finding ways of making the golf courses pay for themselves, and bringing the course alive. Attracting the children and making the golf course a family-friendly place is a huge part of this.”
This article was initially featured in the October 2009 issue of Golf Course Architecture