Few men can be said to have done more to help golf spread its wings around the world than Brian Curley.
From growing up in Pebble Beach, northern California, right next to Spyglass Hill and Cypress Point, to getting into the golf business just as the great golf real estate boom began, to pioneering the development of golf in China with the giant Mission Hills group, and now spreading his wings all over Asia, his is a tale of happy events. He met his long-term business partner, Lee Schmidt, on his first day on a golf course site, and the two of them became one of the most successful golf design firms the world has seen. And, since Schmidt’s retirement, Curley has gone from strength to strength, initially still under the Schmidt-Curley banner and now in new company, Curley-Wagner, in partnership with former Nicklaus Design architect Jim Wagner.
Talk to a golf architect about how he came to do what he does, and you probably will hear a tale of a sequence of fortunate accidents, but Curley’s story is more blessed than most. “I knew what I wanted to do when I was 13,” he says. “I grew up in Pebble Beach and caddied and cleaned carts at Spyglass, Pebble and Cypress Point. Jack Nicklaus would come and win the Crosby each year, and I grew up idolising Jack. I was a good golfer, but pro golf was not for me. All the pros in the shop would bitch about their job, so I knew I didn’t want to do that. Bobby Clampett was at the next high school: I was trying to play in the Monterey Open when I was 16 and he was playing in the Open Championship. So, I knew I wasn’t going to be a golf pro.
“I walked into the snack bar at Spyglass one day and there was a little tiny photo of Robert Trent Jones, sitting on a sand dune in his bucket hat, and it said, ‘Robert Trent Jones, golf architect’. I thought to myself, ‘People get paid to design golf courses?’ A bit later, when I was 14 or 15, in the mid-70s, before the great golf residential boom, my mom drove me up to the Bay Area, and I went to see the golf architect Robert Muir Graves. He told me that there weren’t a lot of people who did his job, and you had to go to work for the right guy and carry his bag for 20 years until you got your break. That didn’t sound too encouraging, but I didn’t give up my dream.”
Curley went to the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) at San Luis Obispo, one of the very top colleges for architecture in the US, and not long after he graduated in 1982, he got his big break. “In 1984, I had just got married, and my father-in-law was a commercial real estate developer,” says Curley. “He told me to go see these guys in La Quinta called Landmark Land who were buying up all the land round there. I went to see them and told them I’d do anything. The real estate boom had just started, and Palm Springs was the epicentre of that. They hired me and my first day on the job we started PGA West, and I met Pete Dye and Lee Schmidt. Lee was on the construction team. Pete latched on to me because I could draw. He couldn’t draw his own breath – that’s why he spent so much time on site waving his arms around.”
Dye, of course, as well as being in his own right one of the most significant figures in golf architecture, has gone down to history as perhaps the greatest mentor of talent in the industry’s history. The list of Dye alumni includes names such as Bill Coore, Tom Doak, Tim Liddy, Bobby Weed, Jim Urbina, Rod Whitman and many others. Dye was a big personality, and everyone who worked for him seems to have a favourite ‘Pete story’. “That whole Pete Dye family tree of designers dominate the industry now,” says Curley. “If you were in Trent Jones’s office and were low on the totem pole, you’d probably have been drawing plans all the time. Because Pete didn’t draw, it wasn’t like that with him. Pete was a great talker, and I spent so much time around him that I can impersonate him pretty well. He wasn’t bashful, he talked a lot. The people who came out of his family tree are loose and talk a lot. Other big firms are run in the style of the boss. Pete was never the boss, in fact, given that I was representing Landmark, if anything Lee and I were his boss. But being with him was just like going to school. If you want to be successful in this business, you have to be good at what you do obviously, but you have to be able to get on with people and sell. Pete was the best salesman, and that ability is a massive help.
“Courses by the people who learned with Pete don’t always look like Dye courses, but there’s a lot of commonality in terms of angles and how they are set up. I believe it would be a lot easier to take a manufactured Pete Dye course and redo it in a naturalistic style than it would be to take a Jones course and do the same.
“Landmark built the PGA West Stadium course, and they bought the Ryder Cup for a tiny sum of money. Then the US lost the Ryder Cup for the first time in forever and it became competitive and a huge thing. The cup was going to be in Palm Springs in September when it’s incredibly hot, and the PGA came to them and said, ‘We want you to move it to the East Coast for TV reasons’. Landmark had just bought the Kiawah Island site and they committed the Ryder Cup to go there before they’d even started building it. Lee and I went to visit the site with Pete, and there were deer ticks all over the place. Pete was obsessed by the ticks. We were having lunch, and Pete had pushed his chair back from the table. He had his shirt right up and he was scraping his body with the butter knife looking for ticks.”
Curley headed up Landmark’s design office for years, until the opportunity that would change his life came about. “It was when the World Cup was held at Mission Hills in Shenzhen, China, in 1995,” he says. “Fred Couples and Davis Love won; it was the first uncensored TV event in China. The guy who ran the event knew the people from Landmark and mentioned that Mission Hills wanted to do a couple of other courses, so I went to China, and really hit it off with the chairman, Dr David Chu. We went out for karaoke, and I sang House of the Rising Sun. People said to me, ‘You can’t sing that, that’s the chairman’s song, but we ended up singing it together and bonding. When I decided to go off on my own, Landmand and I worked out a deal, and a part of that was that I had to come up with a bunch of money very quickly. I raised the money – somehow – from people in the golf club bar!” Curley and his old Dye mate Lee Schmidt became partners, and the name Schmidt-Curley would soon be almost everywhere in the developing golf world.
Very quickly, Mission Hills became a behemoth, and before long Curley was Mr Golf in Asia. “People ask me, ‘How have you become so successful in Asia?’ The answer is that I’m pretty good at what I do obviously, but also that I’m really good at travelling – a lot of people say that they can’t work in Asia because it takes them a week to get over the flight. And it may sound silly, but I’m the king of karaoke and across Asia, that’s how you bond with people.
“And I take decisions quickly,” he goes on. “To paraphrase Johnny Rotten, I know what I want, and I know how to get it. We had done the Faldo course at Mission Hills, and they added some land. I showed up on a Thursday and there was a note to me to see if they could add another course next to it. I drew a very rough grading plan, and they started construction on Monday! I always tell people that concentrating on Asia was both the best and worst thing I ever did. We had a chokehold on China and Asia when most guys in the industry had very little on. But at the same time, we became so China-centric that we lost our hold on domestic jobs, and when there was a little bit of a resurgence, we were the ‘China guys’, which didn’t really help.”
Another thing that was both a boon and a curse was the firm’s involvement in the signature design business. Mission Hills’s original Shenzhen property has courses each ‘designed’ by different golfing personalities including Annika Sörenstam, Vijay Singh and David Leadbetter, though the later Haikou resort eschews the signature design model, and Curley has worked in the guise of top pros at many other courses. “Signature design was hugely helpful for us at first, because it kept us busy, but the flipside is that it has reduced our profile and kept us somewhat anonymous,” he says. “As the signature model has become less dominant, that has been something of a problem, and it is something we’re working to fix.”
Lee Schmidt retired in 2019, and since then Curley has continued to run the business on his own. But that has now changed. “I have become very busy, all over the place. I’ve gone around the world seven times over the last eight months. I guarantee I get 15 per cent of my sleep on airplanes,” he says. “I realised I need to work with someone, and ideally someone I could hand over the business to down the road. I don’t want to retire, I just want to slow down, and I need a partner who can eventually run the business and let me do what I do. I needed to create a model that would allow me to do that.”
Curley thought long and hard about who his new partner might be, before identifying longtime Nicklaus architect Jim Wagner, with the help of his colleague, contractor Martin Moore of Flagstick Golf Construction. “Martin and I go way back,” he says. “Lee and I started Flagstick and brought Martin on and eventually he bought the business from us. He is the best in the business, and he has for a long time wanted to find someone he can hand it off to, like me. We kept kicking around names, and eventually we came up with Jim Wagner. I thought he was very set at Nicklaus, but I called him, and he was very enthusiastic. We have a bunch of common friends, and they all said, ‘You guys would be fantastic together’. I would run into roadblocks with potential candidates, because they wanted to go to Asia only say three times a year, but Jim said, ‘I want to move back to Manila’.
So now Schmidt-Curley is no more, and Curley-Wagner has replaced it. But some things don’t change. On any given day, Brian Curley is likely to be on a plane somewhere.
Recently, that somewhere has been the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with Red Sea Global. The Shura Links course, spread across an idyllic island site, is well into construction and is now being grassed,” says Curley. “This project is unbelievable in its size and quality and will undoubtedly be seen as one of the best in the Middle East, offering numerous holes with massive sea views.”
This article first appeared in the July 2024 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.