Golf legend Gary Player tees off the Cliffs at Mountain Park course opening
The golf course at the Cliffs at Mountain Park development in northern Greenville County officially opened last Friday. It was designed by golf great Gary Player and his team from Gary Player Designs (GPD). The company has developed more than 300 golf courses around the world, but the Upstate has the distinction of having drawn Player, his company and his family to settle here.
Player, GPD President Scott Ferrell, and senior designer Jeff Lawrence sat down with UBJ to talk about the game and the business they’ve built upon it. They discussed the course’s design, which Player said aims to allow experts to amateurs to play a game they can feel good about without being exhausted. Then they discussed the work that goes on before the play.
Are these “player-friendly” courses where golf is headed?
Gary Player: Well, golf course development in America has come, not to an end, but there is very little today because the economy has changed this considerably. This is one of the very few that will be open in America today.
Jeff Lawrence: There will be less than five this year.
Scott Ferrell: To give some perspective, in the 1990s there were probably 300 or 400 opening a year in the United States.
GP: What we’ve got to do is get young people to play golf to fill the vacuum of members when they’re dead and gone. I think this is something we’re doing very well [through the Player Foundation] in South Africa.
What’s the relationship between the business and Player’s golf career?
SF: This is a competitive business, but Mr. Player has been known for 60 years as an international ambassador to golf and won golf tournaments in every corner of the world. We build the brand around him, which allows us to sell our services much easier. And our clients benefit from his notoriety and his exposure in order to sell real estate. So we’re as much a marketing company as we are a design company because of the brand that he’s created about his playing career.
GP: I’ve been able to sell a lot of real estate because I’ve only got to mention a particular development on national television or in prominent magazines, and people will buy. You can have a local sales force, but what you need is an international voice that’s going all over and appealing to the masses. If you’re going to sell real estate, you’ve got to appeal to the masses.
What about on a more personal level?
GP: The personal overlap is that having traveled so many miles and played in so many different golf courses for more than 60 years, I really understand what is required to make players happy. We incorporate that into our design and our business, because no education – not even a Harvard degree – can compare to traveling around the world. An average Harvard grad wouldn’t know what’s happening in China or India beyond what he reads, but I go there and I see what’s happening.
SF: Golf is a very difficult game and you’re going to lose more than you win. You have a lot of adversity. And we have had a lot of adversity particularly in the last five years in the business world. I think Mr. Player’s example of persevering through adversity as a golfer has carried over into persevering through difficult times in business.
GP: A lot of other design businesses are gone. They folded up while we still had 10 jobs a year going because I have got on a plane as a young man, and now Jeff and Scott are doing it. When we go in, it’s more than just a golf course. In South Africa, for example, we have a development fund for getting very poor young people exposed to golf. So it’s more than a business. It’s also trying to contribute to society. I think that’s the thing we’ve done better by a mile than all the architects that have ever lived, if I may say so.
