Seeing the world: golf in Mongolia
Florida native Jason Chennault is among the world’s most travelled golf course superintendents. As he prepares to open Mongolia’s first golf resort, he tells GCA why he keeps moving
“My whole goal, when I went to college, was to get out of America and see the world,” says Jason Chennault, by phone from his home in Moscow. He’s certainly done that. GCA caught up with the Florida native only a day or two before his return for a second season of grow-in at the Mount Bogd golf course outside the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. Chennault’s Mongolian visa had just arrived, and he was packing for a return to the frozen steppes of Central Asia.
“I graduated in 1996 and by 1999 I was in Manila at my first superintendent’s job – managing 26 holes at the Orchard club,” he recalls. “It had the biggest clubhouse I’ve ever seen. The eighteenth hole of the Palmer course is cut through a mango orchard – that’s where the club gets its name.It’s a par five, and the clubhouse starts at the 250 yard mark! That gave me the bug.
“I had travelled the Caribbean and other parts of North America on holiday, but I’d never worked outside the US. And it was hard to adapt. I didn’t fit into the culture. I ended up back in America a year later –a connection in the Philippines sent me to Lost Canyons in California, under Jeff Pritchard, and we opened 36 holes. After that, I went down to the Bahamas for a grow in, then to Aruba, over to Costa Rica, and to Puerto Peñasco in Mexico – mostly either grow-in jobs, or there was some kind of renovation going on.
“I came to Moscow in 2007, to work with a group that was closely tied to the government, and were planning five projects. We opened the second eighteen hole golf course in the country, and we hosted the Russian Senior Open in 2008. As for Ulaanbaatar, I saw an advertised opening, and it turned out I had a social media connection to a guy who was responsible for helping the club hire someone. I reached out to him, and that’s how I got the job, and I came here for the first time last July.”
That travelogue tells you most of what you need to know about Jason Chennault. Few people his age can have worked in a wider range of locations. So, what has he learned about the global golf industry during his travels? “The biggest key is that you have to be adaptable, fluid,spontaneous,” he says. “When you think about something that seems really extraordinary, in some places it can be a very ordinary way of thinking. A guy that’s successful internationally has to be results oriented. You have to find a way to get the result.”
Operating at the bleeding edge means established procedures don’t necessarily work, something Chennault is learning fast in the extreme climate of Mongolia. “The guy who developed the seed we have on our greens gave me protocols for growing that grass,” he says. “I have had to tell him – I can’t do that, I don’t have the temperatures, I don’t have the tools, but I know I can get a great surface if I do it right. He wants me to be aggressively verticutting and at a certain level of fertility, moisture and cutting heights.But I can’t.”
Similarly, working in countries where golf is new means training staff basically from scratch. “You have to be a great teacher,” he explains. “It’s about being willing to be hands on, sleeves rolled up. You can’t lead from a cart, you have to do it with them. You participate in whatever they enjoy – if they like to play football at lunchtime, play football with them. But it is incredibly rewarding when you have an impact on people. If you hired my translator from my first job in Russia, I think he’d be a really good deputy greenkeeper. His life’s now completely different.”
Mount Bogd, designed by David Dale of Golfplan (another famously globetrotting organisation), is Mongolia’s first real golf course, and Chennault says it is a wild ride. “We’re at the base of a mountain, about 15km from the city,” he says. “It’s a wide-open, windswept place with one tree on it, and native tundra fescue everywhere. They basically just turned over enough rock and spread topsoil to have golf holes. It’s an amazing contrast – there’s rock everywhere, and the colours, gold and green are beautiful.
“We’re in a big valley with 300 plus days of sunshine a year. We’re getting all our grass from Jacklin – T1 bentgrass on the greens, and NuGlade bluegrass mixed with fine fescues for everything else. Top guys. The temperature averages 22-23˚C in the summer, blue skies and a nice breeze, just perfect for golf. A nice natural creek that’s spring fed runs down the mountain and splits the property.”
That’s the good side. Now for the bad. “It truly is the most extreme climate I’ve ever seen,” Chennault says. “It feels like it’ll peel your skin off, it’s so dry. You can feel your skin cracking during the day. The wind rips through you. But it’s pure air. Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city in the world, and in the winter you could eat the air. The city might be covered in smog, but you look back towards it from the site, you’re in perfect air,with lots of little birds fluttering through the fescue. Ulanbaatar is a city if 1.5 million people, but it feels like a village. Every building is a vertical high-rise, so you can cover the whole city in ten or fifteen minutes driving.”
Mount Bogd is being developed by Mongolia’s richest man, Odjargal Jambaljamts, chairman of Mongolian Mining Corporation. “He just loves golf,” Chennault says. “There are 160 registered golfers in the Mongolian federation, all playing on artificial greens at Genghis Khan Golf Links in the city. They can’t wait for this place to be ready.”
And when it is, Chennault will no doubt be planning his next move.
This article first appeared in Golf Course Architecture Issue 32.