8am – Cup of tea, check Monty’s and Goosen’s fan email, they range from corporate golf days, design enquiries to autographs and endorsement requests. Check the press for any news stories. With all the recent Ryder Cup speculation around Monty there is always plenty to look through.
9am – Cup of tea, onto the main task of the day which is drawing up green details for a new project in Cyprus.
10am – Take a phone call from the European Tour to update the Tented Village plan for the Portugal Masters, needs to be done by lunch so plan can go to the printers for inclusion in the event brochure.
10.45am – Cup of tea, back to the green details.
1pm – Lunch, Waitrose ready meal.
1:30pm – Cup of tea, computer problem, fix laptop with network card issue.
2:30pm – Cup of tea, back to green details.
4:00 – 4:15pm – Break for a cup of tea.
4:15 – 6:30pm – Finish green details and onto some IT maintenance and backups, EGD’s file system is now over 1 terabyte.
7:30pm – Fill in the days timesheet over a can of beer.
8pm – Leave for home.
When asked what makes a great project most golf architects would quickly say it’s having a great site. While this is true its only part of the equation, almost as important is the people. Without good people a great site will never reach its full potential. Fortunately for me I was given the chance to work on a project that was blessed with both.
On the first of September The Montgomerie Course at Papillon Golf Club opened its doors for a select number of golfers to experience the course prior to the course being overseeded at the end of month and the official opening ceremony in October. This marks the end of a two and half years of hard work, a awful lot of sweat and even some tears (usually at Golf Managers very bad jokes!) and although this was a very proud day for all involved it was also tinged with a little sadness. The opening of the course effectively draws to a close my involvement on what has been a hugely enjoyable project and also ends my fortnightly trip to the kebab shop in downtown Belek. As with any project it has had its fair share of stressful days and even the odd heated word but ultimately everything was always forgotten over a cold beer after work. As I said at the beginning it’s often the people that make the project and that has never been more true than in Turkey regarding all my new friends at Papillon and Golf Med.
Racing driver Martin Brundle once described one of his crashes by saying, “I thought the last two barrel rolls were a bit unnecessary. I was already well aware I was having a big accident by then!” This is a little bit like I felt about the heat in Bahrain last week. Now, you don’t need to be a meteorologist to comprehend that August in the Gulf is going to be a tad on the warm side and all of us at Riffa Views who have routinely slogged away in temperatures well into the 40’s have got used to feeling uncomfortably sticky as we go about our work. Last week took this endurance test to an entirely new level.
It started after lunch, as we trooped out of the luxurious air-conditioned comfort of Subway and into the furnace of the 1pm Bahraini sunshine. We could tell it was going to be a long, energy-sapping afternoon. My first task upon returning to site was to stake out the bunker edging for the 11th hole. Being a desert course, this also doubled up as the extent of grassing all along the right edge of this 350-yard par 4. I loaded up four bundles of red stakes and four cans of red spray paint and drove the 300 metres from the site camp to the midpoint of the fairway. I trooped slowly back towards the tee and started to bang in the stakes at regular intervals. Already I could feel my heart begin to pound and perspiration was literally erupting from every pore. My sunglasses quickly became covered in sweat as it ran off my brow and into my eyes, stinging them viciously. Squinting through salty eyelids, I took my glasses off to wipe them clean, but I had nothing dry enough on me to clear the lenses. My bare arms were a slick of perspiration, with the occasional droplet falling to the floor. There was no point wiping my forehead with my arm; both were soaking. My body had sprung a leak!
“Just get this bit done and you can go and cool off”, I told myself. Moving very slowly and with regular breaks to catch my breath, it took another 20 minutes to mark out the rest of the bunker edging. By then, I was literally gagging for a drink and trudged wearily the short distance back to the 4×4 through the desert sand. Opening the door, I caught sight of the temperature gauge on the dashboard and the reason for my struggles became immediately apparent. Located together were two numerals I had only ever thought could exist in tandem on a Heinz beans tin. First….a 5….and then….a…7! 57° Celsius!!! Or if you like it in old money, 134.6° Fahrenheit. That isn’t a temperature, that’s a gas mark!
It’s been a long hot job getting Riffa Views built, but last week took the biscuit. In fact, you could probably cook biscuits in that heat!
