Big, bold, brash. Adam Lawrence visits Sun City developer Sol Kerzner's latest golf project.

It’s always nice to see large-scale projects that do something slightly away from the norm. The blueprint for the big golf resort was laid down some time ago: nice spot, preferably on a beach, with good weather; a big name signature to design a course that flatters the occasional player and has enough eye candy to make even non-golfers stop and take a second look; good service; and either housing or hotels occupying most of the prime real estate.

The trouble with this recipe is that we’ve seen it all before. It is understandable that developers would want to play safe on projects that might involve an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds or euros, but in a market where travelling golfers have more choice than ever before of where to take their holidays, a me-too approach doesn’t help to build identity. High powered marketing consultants can come in and identify the unique selling propositions of a destination, but once on property, so many of these resorts have a sameness to them.

This starts with the masterplan. Although, thankfully, planners seem largely to have realised that the eighties-style development strategy of loading as much property onto either side of single fairways is hardly the best way to attract golfers looking for an exotic new experience, it’s still the case that on many projects, planners not desperately sympathetic to golf plonk the holes on the worst land, leaving the unfortunate golf architect to make the best of a bad job, perhaps throwing out a bone with a tiny amount of ocean frontage at one end of the site.

There are exceptions, of course. Sir Rocco Forte’s Verdura development in Sicily proves that you can put golf all the way along the coastal portion of a site without ruining the views from the accommodation. And it’s also true that golf, even in golf-focused resorts, is only one of many amenities whose needs have to be balanced. But if a property of say 200ha is to be three-quarters occupied by golf holes it doesn’t seem unreasonable that those holes should be planned in such a way as to maximise the attractions of the site.

South African developer Sol Kerzner has a reputation for not doing things by halves. Coming to global attention by building Sun City, perhaps Africa’s most ambitious resort, in the late Seventies, and defying international boycotts to bring big name stars there during the apartheid period, Kerzner’s projects tend to be on the grand scale, as his Atlantis resort on the Palm artificial island in Dubai also shows. So, when the Kerzner organisation acquired a large piece of Atlantic beachfront near the Moroccan town of El Jadida, about an hour west of Casablanca, it’s no surprise it went all-in.

Casinos are Kerzner’s stock in trade, and, as anyone who has been to Las Vegas can testify, bigger is pretty much always better in that business. So Kerzner’s Mazagan casino, beach and golf resort is unsurprisingly enormous, with over 500 rooms in the resort hotel and a substantial number of luxury villas for sale around the property.

Kerzner’s relationship with the Gary Player design firm goes all the way back to Sun City, so it wasn’t a surprise that the practice was asked to build Mazagan’s golf course. Player has picked up a number of very dramatic sites in recent years, with properties such as the Thracian Cliffs development in Bulgaria winning international attention. It’s hard to imagine, though, that the firm has ever been lucky enough to work on so naturally perfect a property as Mazagan.

The Mazagan course, built by Player lead architect Frank Henegan, starts conventionally enough: the first hole, though wide, inviting and attractive, is flanked by some of those extremely high end villas. Get to the sixth hole, though, and everything changes: emerging from the villa development, the golfer is surrounded only by golf, with the remainder of the course entirely core in its design, traversing the sand dunes of this stretch of Moroccan coast.

At the seventh green, the golfer makes his first acquaintance with the Atlantic, and the routing pays a number of visits back to the coastline. Oftentimes, attempting to get back to the water several times leads to a disjoined routing, with substantial gaps between holes, but here the flow is pretty good. Were it not for the first six holes, and the inevitable gaps caused by passing through the villa development, plus the course’s extreme length (it is almost 7,500 yards from the back tees), Mazagan would be a delightful walk, although I imagine the overwhelming majority of players will choose to take a cart.

Perhaps the course’s most memorable hole is the par three fifteenth, right at the eastern end of the property, and playing directly towards the beach. A single small bunker protects the centre of the green, giving players a range of options of ways to play the hole, depending on aptitude, pin location, wind and even whim. It’s the start of an impressive run home, with the long sixteenth running along the beach for its whole length, the seventeenth heading slightly inland and the home hole returning to the foreshore.

There are some problems, of course. The Platinum paspalum used in all the playing areas is an excellent turf, but it needs skilled and careful management if it is to deliver the kind of surface that a course like this – which is a genuine links in soil, topography and design – requires. Management firm Troon is working with Mazagan’s greenkeeping team to provide agronomic assistance, but the embryonic Moroccan golf industry doesn’t seem to have the expertise to present the course in the way it should. Paspalum is capable of delivering a fast and bouncy surface, but it needs to be kept dry and lean, or it becomes ‘sticky’, with chip shots catching in the fringes, and an aerial approach the only sensible option. Green surrounds are being kept too fluffy, where they should be shaved, encouraging the sort of shots that makes links golf what it is. There is expertise around the world in delivering links conditions on warm season grasses: hopefully the Mazagan team will figure this out in time.

Nonetheless, the course is more than impressive. Architect Henegan, now out on his own, can be extremely proud of the work he did at Mazagan, and, having seen a number of Moroccan courses during a trip a few months ago, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is the leader in the clubhouse. The Kerzner group has been experiencing some well-publicised financial difficulties of late, but assuming those problems are resolved one way or the other, it isn’t hard to see Mazagan having a very successful future, and perhaps attracting a major professional event one day.

This article first appeared in issue 29 of GCA, published July 2012