1 ADAM LAWRENCE WELCOME In the last issue of GCA, we carried an interview with Jeremy Slessor, the boss of European Golf Design (EGD), the architectural firm owned by the European Tour. EGD started off as a vehicle for projects that were marketed as signature designs by touring professionals, but in the last ten years or so, the firm’s courses are now mostly billed to its four lead architects. Of the first generation of big-name signature designers, Arnold Palmer is dead and both Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player are well into their eighties, so it is an easy conclusion to reach that this model is in retreat. Slessor told GCA that he believes many developers have concluded there are better ways to spend marketing budget than handing over a substantial signature fee. But there are markets around the world, including some of the fastest-growing where this is not true. Slessor did add that the pro signature model was still very popular in Asian golf markets, and in Vietnam, the subject of our lead feature in this issue, it still seems to dominate. Of the top ten courses in Vietnam on top100golfcourses.com, three were designed by Greg Norman’s firm, two by Jack Nicklaus’s, one by Nick Faldo’s and one is credited to Luke Donald and done by IMG’s design office. Why should this be so? The relative youth of golf in Vietnam is surely the main reason: when there is no great history of golf in a country, an obvious way to attract attention to the game is to bring in names that people who are not deeply enmeshed in the game might have heard of. Another is the lack of a domestic resident golf design industry. Only one of the top ten, Sky Lake’s Lake course by Korean Ahn Moon Hwan, was designed by an Asian architect: if you are having to import designers, it makes sense that you would choose big names. Will Vietnam grow its own domestic golf designers? Given the speed at which golf is taking off in the country, don’t bet against it. Are signatures being erased?
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