57 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 Mission Hills, which has 22 golf courses across its Shenzhen and Hainan Island locations, is where Curley made his name. Pictured is the fifteenth hole on the Blackstone course at Mission Hills Haikou Photo: Tom Breazeale
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