Dale talks China’s golf problem

I caught up with golf architect David M. Dale recently, to talk to him about maintaining the designs and depth of sand in bunkers. Look for that piece in this month’s issue of Golfdom, out soon.

David M. Dale, ASGCA, says seeing one of his Chinese projects get trees planted on the greens by the government gives him a “sick” feeling. Photo by Seth Jones

While I had him on the phone, I asked him about the reported crackdown taking place on Chinese golf right now. Most of Dale’s business is in Asia — he had been back and forth to Asia every week in the month of June — and the restrictions did have him concerned.

“I’ve got club managers over there who are telling me they can’t afford $50,000-a-month in water taxes,” he says. “Meanwhile, the water source is so polluted that you couldn’t drink it, but you could use it to irrigate a course.”

Dale told me that business did seem to be diminishing internationally, yet he still had a full slate of meetings he had to make in Beijing this week. Some of those meetings were troubleshooting routing problems to avoid penalties on ongoing construction projects.

Reports have been that there are arrangements with most courses, with officials looking the other way. Not so, says Dale, who has had at least one of his projects “snuffed.”

“We had a best new course in 2007, Qiandaohu Country Club in Hangzhou, it was a sparkling jewel. The government not only shut down the course but they planted trees on all the greens,” Dale says. “It gives you a sick feeling. It’s an emotional thing, when you’ve done all that work on a course and they plant trees on the greens. People moved into this community, it was a nice place, successful. They just say, ‘Sorry, it’s too close to a reservoir,’ despite the fact that we had biofiltration all around the golf holes.”