THE EAGLE HAS LANDED, 9-10 Oct, 2008
November 18th, 2008Frank O’Dowd, Golf Course designer and Golf Course builder
Passage quotation of speech
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A couple of months ago I heard about a project here in Varna and I contacted Chris.
As the design is quite now 7500 meters, even if there is someone better than Tiger Woods in ten years or twenty years it is still going to kick. In that sense the golf course has more than enough room to be a world class championship golf course in length, then it comes down to me to put the new axis to put the creativity into it. That only can be done by being on site. You can do so much drawing, but it has to be done on the field. That is the approach that Intergolf Inc. takes, that is the approach that I take. By taking on this project with Chris, it is taken on personally, not by one of my staff, it is taken on by me, I will be here, we will do it. When this project is done, my next project might be in Vietnam or China. I move, I go there. We take on very specific projects.
I envision this project and the development around it to be, as I would say, very environmentally friendly and we have had many discussions about how we can incorporate the people that are not part of golf, to be able to use the golf. Not necessarily to play it but what can we do to make the golf part of the whole development. We have talked about creating a situation and a system where you have bike trails, horse trails, walking trails, and to start incorporating people into the environmental side of golf, for them to be able to understand that, to take a stroll in the evening or to take a bike and take your five year-old kid for a ride, that you can go down the car-paths, that golf courses are designed in such a way that you can do that. That can be done in a sustainable way to make this work. And it is interesting to work with Chris in this matter, because very few people in the golf industry want to really do that. They don’t want to incorporate, they want to separate. For me it is a challenge to create this. We have the space to do it here, and I think it is going to turn into a fantastic project.
Q: Are we ready to move?
A: We are right now waiting for the final survey on the golf course property which should be finished here in a couple of weeks. It will take me about 30 to 40 days to finalize all the construction drawings. In the meantime we can start construction even before these drawings are completed.
Q: How much will these two golf courses cost?
A: One of the things that we do, we provide full design and build solutions. I have sat with Chris and here we are looking at in the region and when we get down to final planning I can probably galvanize it much closer, but we are looking at an 8 M euro investment for this particular project and another 8 M for the other project. About 4,5 of that is actually construction cost and the other 2,5-3 or 3,5 is material cost. 8 M Includes the design feed and the construction cost and when we get the final planning done we can nail that down and I do not envision any of this to go over 8 M. I don’t see any reason why it should. We have done golf courses cheaper and we have also done golf courses as high as 160 M dollars. We have the ability to take property, predict what it will cost to do it and do it
