Dubai Holding has officially pulled the plug on its Tiger Woods-designed golf course.
Not a grain of sand has been moved for Al-Ruwaya Golf Club since 2009, and construction was officially halted in 2010. For his trouble, though, Woods pocketed a staggering $55.4 million, and Arabian Business reports that he was to receive an additional $14.6 million when the course opened.
These days, six mostly completed holes are out there somewhere in the desert, gathering dust.
Pete Harradine, a course designer with an office in Dubai, thinks the prospects for golf development in the Middle East “have definitely improved” but won’t likely ever match what they were before the Great Recession.
“Much of it was commercially unsustainable,” he said in an interview with KPMG’s Golf Advisory Practice. “The fees were crazy. The construction was crazy. The returns, even in the good days, would never have warranted that type of expenditure.”
If the Middle East expects to thrive as a golf market, he believes, it needs to divorce itself from residential development and start building affordable tracks that can generate indigenous growth.
“For the overall good of the game and business,” he says, “we need more people to be playing golf in the developing golf countries.”
No doubt, building a sustainable golf industry isn’t as easy as Harradine suggests it is. But as the Middle East has discovered, there’s a limit to how far wealthy home buyers, fickle tourists and fly-by corporate executives can take us.