Golf Course Architecture magazine recently published A decade of golf design: industry figures reflect on the past ten years. The article provides comments from golf architects and others; their experience in the profession and golf industry, over the past 10 years.
This is an excerpt from the article,
“Some are still in the same place, but even for them life has changed. Rick Baril, along with his colleague Mike Smelek, is still running the firm of von Hagge, Smelek and Baril, but the firm is now minus its founding father, who died in 2010 aged 83. For Baril, losing his mentor, Robert von Hagge, is naturally the strongest memory of the last decade. “Obviously when someone is that age, we expected and planned for it,” he says. “Intellectually you know it’s going to happen, but emotionally it was soul destroying. He was a 30 year mentor and also like a father. He was frustrated in those last years, because he couldn’t do what he had always done. Even when he was able to travel, the trips were difficult, because he wasn’t in control any more. But we were able to work on some amazing projects. Take Les Bordes in France, which we hope will move ahead with its second course in the near future. We built great relationships with clients that still exist today. We would plan a two week trip and just show up places, somehow it all worked. You can’t work like that nowadays. I remember Robert saying to me: ‘In this business the money comes and goes but the relationships last a lifetime’. That’s a great message and one I have always tried to remember.”
The golf industry has certainly changed in the past 10 years. It will be interesting to see what the next 10 years will bring…