The latest golf course to be conceived by perhaps the world's least reticent billionaire is a revelation, reports John Samuel.
EXCITEMENT, DRAMA, HEARTBREAK. That's what Donald Trump promised for his Million Dollar Invitational on his Canouan Island course in the Caribbean Grenadines recently, and Australian Stuart Deane, the last man left standing, had just about enough energy to stretch out his hand for the million-dollar check proffered by the world's least reticent billionaire. "I'm a big automobile nut," Deane, who lives in Arlington, Texas, told ESPN, the USA's specialist sports network. "Now I'm going to buy myself a great new car." Paying cash, for sure.
Nowhere on the Pro Tour, the USA's golfing third division, does anyone earn a million dollars for making an 18th hole five footer. But the name of this game incorporates a large measure of golfing sadism.
After two conventional rounds on Jim Fazio's entertainingly unconventional mountain course, the final round demanded hole-by hole eliminating shoot-outs. Deane could have disappeared with 20,000 dollars after the first, a 476-yard par five, about the easiest hole on the course, when his putt finished well short. But William McGirt, among the last of the qualifiers, nervously rolled his even shorter, and hole by hole Deane advanced to his million dollars, "desperate my gun wouldn't run out of bullets."
Trump did not get to where he is by being averagely benign to people. He likes them to struggle a little, as you certainly discover first time round on the 6,495-yard par 72, one of five Trump International courses so far and his first outside the USA. Another is on the drawing board for Scotland, his first in Europe, part of a 500-million dollar hotel and course development designed to come on stream by 2008. But more of that in a moment.
The Canouan Resort, opened in December 2004 on a Grenadine tropical island barely three miles square, population 1,500, is an example of the style, if not exactly a template, of what he intends for Aberdeenshire. Basking 100 miles west of Barbados, its primary access port, Canouan has been translated from a lonely sailors' outpost of Empire, a church piously brought stone by stone from England, in to a Raffles resort "paradise."
Raffles in this case is his partner, one of 13 hotels based on the Singapore original. Guests shuttle up and down zig-zag paths in buggies equipped with headlights. They may want to visit Trump's Casino (his Club Privee) in the Villa Monte Carlo up on its hill where we watch a solitary guest (yes, they need a few more off-season) shuttle 100-dollar chips to and fro.
There's a Kids Club and yacht moorings, but the Donald Trump course is the resort's high altar. High is the word, and, certainly for our four-ball, a signal for prayer.
As we quickly discover, the figures on the card are merely a cloak for an "Eagles Dare" challenge. A lightning visit such as ours will always involve a bit of thunder, but some of the tees round the turn are for freefall parachutists – or maybe downhill skiers. You recall that Trump's one-time wife, Ivana, was a Czech ski racer, and as a five-handicapper he does involve himself closely in course design.
At the 13th tee, our four come across a young honeymoon couple beatifically admiring a stunning view of up to 30 Grenadine islands. "Why aren't you playing golf?" we ask a little archly, knowing full well the appeal of the Raffles Resort here, its 150 hillside villas a shady, sumptuous retreat from silken silvery sand and coral protected sea, its pool eloquently shaped after this miniparadise of an island.
Their reply puts us down. "Too windy for golf today..."
It's a cooling, temperate wind, as so often here, but a lost-ball count of about five per man suggests the nature of the design: after a lulling start a motorized climb towards forested crests, then sweeping descents. The 148 yards of the fourteenth is especially memorable. You have to peer over the edge to see the green. But what club to use? Our 5-handicapper swears it is a pitching wedge. My discreet 7-wood has my last Titleist disappearing forever over eight-foot high boondocks 50 yards beyond the green. Maybe I should have lined up on a different mountain and taken my putter. The adventure doesn't end there. Our single-figure man wins our four-ball better-ball with a nine at the parfive 17th, everyone else twice splashing in to the curvy water to the left or lost in the softly deceiving rough or volcanic rubble to the right. Well, only a third of Trump's pros broke 80 on the first round.
"Best leave your driver in your villa and play it short and straight, certainly first time," says English assistant pro Wayne Greer, once of Littlehampton, now at ease in his golfing El Dorado. His boss Simon Blanshard gravely says they're lengthening the course by 300 yds, ensuring Trump International stays with the technical top-ups. "But when people of all abilities walk off and say, 'It's the best course in the world', that's good enough for me."
The two ladies of our party skip the golf for the Amrita beauty treatment, its roots in the concept of eternal youth. Two of the Palepas, or palm-thatched huts doing duty as salons, stand dreamily in the curved turquoise bay round which the resort is set, amphitheatre fashion. Manon, our St Tropez colleague, glows from her treatment, and not for that reason alone. France have won their World Cup soccer match while England have lost on penalties to Portugal. We know that because when the satellite transmission failed on England's first missed penalty, a Raffles manager phoned his mother watching the transmission in Salzburg, and we had a kick -by -kick version of events translated from the German. We applaud the manager – the wit of a Raffles, the grist of a Trump – if not the England penalty-takers.
So to Aberdeenshire. Will Trump's £300million ambitions for the Menie Estate, 12 miles north of the Granite City, translate as agreeably as Canouan? So far it's been Excitement and Drama. But what of Heartbreak? Is there chance of Trump himself getting the "You're fired" treatment he regularly dishes out on NBC's original for the Alan Sugar Apprentice programme?
The Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Forum at once hailed the Trump project as the biggest thing since the oil boom, but for a crop of reasons the planning application was stalled. Which is not the Trump way. Launching his project in April, Donald J, never one to under do things, was piped off his private jet by Andrew Macleod of Stornaway, and from his red carpet announced, "This is where my mother was born and I should almost kiss the earth. We are looking to build the greatest golf course in the world."
Mary Anne Macleod, his mother, was indeed born on the island of Lewis before emigrating to the United States, but it was seeing the majestic unspoiled dune land of the Menie Estate's shooting and angling acres which persuaded Trump that this, indeed, was the place.
Gleneagles, eat your heart out. Plans were unrolled for a vast "six star" Victorian edifice of a hotel, supported by multiple restaurant services (Raffles on Canouan has four), spa, banquet and conference facilities, and, not least, two classic links courses designed by Tom Fazio II, together with clubhouse, practice facilities, and teaching and turf grass research academies. It is scheduled to provide work for 400 people, and warm endorsements instantly followed from Jim McLennan, Scotland's First Minister, Jack Perry, chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, and Peter Lederer, the Visit Scotland chairman.
True, 85 per cent of Scotland's visitors are from the UK, but the North-East, from Royal Dornoch and Skibo Castle down to Royal Aberdeen, seeks its share of US golfers, many with ancestral links, most with boxes to tick on "the Big Ones". Not that it ends there. Indian visitors have overtaken the Russians at Gleneagles. The Swedes roll up as if it were the Riviera, and keep on coming. And Jack McLennen has twice visited Beijing, aware that the Chinese market is due a Scottish Long March now that travel restrictions have been lifted.
But, golf being golf, there had to be snags, and Trump and Co were quickly playing a set of provisionals. The Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group (AREG), it became apparent, had a proposal for 33 wind turbines, sails as long as a Soccer pitch, almost immediately offshore. "On the 18th green I want to see the ocean, not windmills," said Trump. A call for a referee, if you like. The plan, it seemed, could be amended to 23 turbines and a shift of location. AREG had that in mind already, so it was said.
Soon Jack McConnell was rejecting out-of-hand a Green MP claim that he was in breach of ministerial rules in his involvement with Mr. Trump. His was a card dutifully signed, he indicated. Next, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and a ball very much in the rough. What would happen to all the badgers and otters, the birds and the geese, in this most natural of environments?
"We take the environmental aspects very seriously," says Ashley Cooper, of the Trump organization. "We had a self-imposed date at the end of May that we wanted to file this application. But there was a very long Spring – in March there was two feet of snow on the ground, and our environmentalists couldn't finish the work that was necessary. The initial plan was to file an outline application. Now it will take us to early Fall. We want to get it right. Mr. Trump is totally committed."
Well, Aberdeenshire thought up the five-minute lost-ball rule. You drop another, count the penalty stroke, and play on. Donald Trump, I suspect, will soon be hiring, not firing.
John Samuel, former sports and leisure editor of The Guardian, is a freelance golf travel and business writer.
