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Riffa Views article for ‘In The Game’, written by Robin Hiseman |
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Nov 6, 2007: “OK, Colin, Try to imagine the pin’s on the back right of the green and see if you can float one in there.”
These aren’t instructions that I, a keen, but flaw-ridden 9-handicap golfer, ever thought I’d be giving to eight-times European Order of Merit winner and Ryder Cup legend, Colin Montgomerie, but this wasn’t an ordinary situation that I found myself in. The scene was a barren piece of desert, some 20 kilometres outside of Manama, the capital city of the gulf state of Bahrain. A small group of us had gathered to join Monty on a tour of his new golf course project for Riffa Views. At this time, the course consisted of no more than a few tall plastic poles scattered amongst the sand drifts, signifying proposed tee off points, doglegs and greens.
Monty’s task was to test drive the proposed Par 3 7th hole; a challenging 170-yard shot, with a deep, natural ravine to the right and rear of the proposed green site. I, as Monty’s golf course architect was a little concerned that the target was bordering on the unfair, so I had set him up to try and drop a ball onto the toughest hole location, close by the edge of the precipice.
Picking up a club borrowed from the pro shop and with a yellow, budget golf ball (of indeterminate brand) Monty pressed a tee through the crust of the desert sand and with barely a pause, smote the ball with his trademark languid, rhythmical swing. Amidst an explosion of sand, the ball arched gracefully through the cloudless late afternoon sky on a soft, fading arc and dropped to ground precisely on the spot I’d asked him to aim for. If there had been a hole there, it would have been a kick-in birdie putt. A spontaneous round of applause broke out, intermingled with assorted quick-witted quips and comments, acknowledging the almost effortless ease with which a conceivably impossible task had been overcome.
Now, it probably isn’t of much relevance to the average golfer who will make up the vast majority of the clientele at Riffa Views, that one of the most skilled practitioners ever to swing a club managed to hit a shot pretty much exactly where he was told to, but it at least proved that the shot wasn’t impossible…only nearly so!
It’s not unusual for the golf course design team to play dirt golf during the construction phase; testing out how a hole feels and if the bunkers are in the right place to influence play, but it is unusual to be able to draw on the services of a legend to help with this task. We got Colin to hit a few more shots whilst we were out there, to check that he was comfortable with the challenge of this Colin Montgomerie signature course.
It probably won’t surprise you that Colin doesn’t spend his time between tournaments hunched over a drawing board, churning out scaled construction plans and detailed bill of quantities. For Riffa Views, he has me to do the grind of actually putting together the mound of plans and documents that help to transform an idea into the three dimensional landforms of a new, championship standard golf course.
It is the ‘idea’ that bears Monty’s hallmark and in this instance we had discussed that the exposed, barren and surprisingly windy desert conditions, bore remarkable resemblance to the conditions you typically find on a British seaside links course. This was going to be a course on which the wind was going to play a decisive role in determining how the game should be played. With the wind (albeit it a very warm wind) howling in your face, or blasting in your back, we were going to need to conceive of a design that gave plenty of opportunities for the golfer to punch the bowl low under the breeze and bump and scuttle the ball across the ground into the greens, rather than imposing a reliance on high-flighted shots into receptive dart board like greens. Fittingly, it was Monty himself who played the shot that cemented this concept in place.
I was watching coverage of the 2006 Dunhill Links Championship from Kingsbarns when Monty came on screen, playing his second shot to the par-five 3rd hole. To be honest, it was a bit of a stinker and he turned away in disgust as the shot arched low and ugly to the left, far from its intended target. But this was a links golf course and his shot hit the ground fast and low. Catching the side of a dune, the ball kicked sharply to the right, before catching another contour that bounced it back to the left again. Now it was tracking onto the left front of the green, where it veered across the face of a gathering slope and turned inexorably to the right, down towards the hole. Some fifteen seconds after he hit the shot it finally came to rest within six inches of the hole for a certain eagle three. Monty can be heard clearly over the microphone exclaiming, “sometimes, I love this game!”.
That one shot crystallised the concept of Riffa Views. We were going to create a course that would give the golfer the chance to experience the same sense of joy and excitement that comes from the seemingly random and unabashedly lucky bounces offered up by links golf; the kind of course where the ball will disappear from view down a gulley or behind a dune, only to reappear bouncing and rolling across the sand hills and with a bit of luck, towards the target.
To achieve this task was going to require a great deal of creativity, for the site of Riffa Views in the most part consisted of utterly barren and in places, flat, featureless desert. Having lived and worked in Scotland for eight years, I was no stranger to links golf and it was this experience that I drew on to conceive of the earth shaping concept for the course. We were going to trying to replicate the sometimes bizarre, misshapen landforms created by the combination of centuries of wind, rain and tide on the loose, shifting sands of a links course; only we were going to do this with bulldozers….and in 12 months!
Now, one can take this concept only so far in the desert because in this climate you can only get plants to grow within the area that you can irrigate and we knew that we could only draw upon a limited supply of water. This meant that each hole would essentially form an island of turf within a barren expanse of sand. Some desert courses treat the boundary between grass and sand with neat, curvilinear lines, as smooth as curves in the road. We planned to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and create a ragged, natural looking edge. Monty and I felt that this would best compliment the craggy, links style of the course with its deep, pot bunkers and crumpled fairways. Indeed, some of these pot bunkers merge directly back into the desert. Monty had made it clear that he believes that bunkers should be designed to inflict a penalty and so they are generally deep and set into mounds or sunken into depressions. Sometimes the only thing you can see from the base of the bunker is the sky!
One of the beauties of working with sand is that it is so malleable. The detailed plans can only take you so far, the rest is instinct and experience. The flexibility of this material allows us to experiment, so for instance we might shape up a bunker where we think it could look good and if we don’t like it we can be rid of it again with just a few passes of the ‘dozer. Working in this way has allowed us to introduce an element of quirkiness to the design. Here and there one will find features that are not typically found on a new design, such as a rocky tor here or a sudden deep pit there. We’re not building gimmicks, but we want the course to contain a few little surprises and hidden secrets.
Writing this in October 2007, we are about halfway through the construction phase. The brutal 50 degree heat of the summer is now behind us and we are well advanced with the shaping of the course. Emerging slowly from the desert is a golf course true to the concept conceived twelve months previously and which in another twelve months will be busy with golfers from dawn to dusk and beyond, thanks to the floodlighting that will illuminate the back nine holes. We can see that its going to be something special. When Monty comes back, we’ll get him back out in the sand to test out some more shots. Maybe I’ll find something a little more challenging for him this time!
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