54 INTERVIEW 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 A golf designer for close to 40 years, Brian Curley has surely clocked up more air miles than anyone else in the business. Adam Lawrence caught up with him in between flights to discuss his career and his new venture with Jim Wagner. Life of Brian BRIAN CURLEY
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