My latest Score column is posted and is a little different from my traditional writing. This one is a one act play featuring Mark Steinberg, Tiger Woods and Saeed al-Muntafiq, with cameos by Elin Nordegren and Brit Stenson.
The column is here.
Here’s a taste:
The Setting: Aboard the $20 million yacht Privacy docked in the calm waters of Jebel Ali, about 35 miles south of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
The Cast: Mark Steinburg, IMG agent to the stars, along with Brit Stenson, head of IMG Golf Design, carefully step onto the boat and proceed to its main board room. There sits Tiger Woods and Saeed al-Muntafiq, the CEO of Dubai development company Tatweer, the firm that has hired the worlds best golfer to build a course for them as part of a sprawling real estate project. Woods and al-Muntafiq are carefully examining a massive diagram that is spread across the table as Steinberg enters and greets Woods.
Steinberg: Way to go Mr. Chairman! The entire golfing world heard about the launch of your golf architecture business, TW Design, and now everyone knows that your first course will be part of an immense real estate project in the desert. How can it get any better than that?
Woods: Thank you very much, Steinie. As you know there are golfers everywhere that may never get a chance to play a links course in Scotland, a tree-lined course in America or the sand belts of Australia. I want to bring them that experience, except this time its in Dubai as part of a billion dollar real estate development.
Ouch!
I love it. I would not be surprised if the next course is at Mission Hills as you alude to with the reference to Duval. They are planning on two more courses and most, if not all of the previous ten were through IMG clients.
Of course they could just re-do Duval’s who no longer has much drawing appeal. But aside from Nicklaus’s course at MH (A pretty standard Nicklaus course), none have been big name designers, just brand names.
We shall see.