Quality in quantity
My First Experience of desert golf came during a holiday to Dubai in 2005 spent with a well- ensconced expatriate pal. It took barely a quarter of the 18 sandy and soul- destroying holes that ensued to vow I’d never again to return Arabian Ranches Golf Club.
Things started so well. Coming from provincial New Zealand where golf is definitely a DIY affair, the service wowed, from bag drop, to the attentive changing room attendant – “Mate, why has that guy just nicked off with my sweaty shoes while I’m sitting here half-naked and defenceless?” – to the brutal self-assessment in the stunning outdoor restaurant afterwards. On reflection, my only mistake that day was ever leaving the confines of the flashiest clubhouse I’d ever encountered because the hospitality sure beat the lukewarm sausage rolls and pints I’d left behind at home, not to mention my golf. This is also presuming the Kiwi club you choose even has a caterer.
From memory I opened with a par but it all went horribly south from there. The Ian BakerFinch design was not long open and had gnarly little desert shrubs thickly dotted just off the sides of every fairway. You were lucky to find your ball if you went off-piste, much less whack it back into play from one of the prickly magnets. I lasted all the way till our fourth hole before finally condemning the former Open champion’s design as ridiculously unplayable. The 10 I rang up there, glaringly oblivious to the technique required to escape crusty desert lies where the ball nestled down in windswept depressions, still haunts.
It’s a good job the bag drop guys were on the ball at rounds end or you could have tipped up my bag and made a small practice bunker back at my mate’s apartment in the aptly named Golden Sands district in Bur Dubai.
Fast-forward the best part of 15 years and my appreciation of Arabian Ranches has completely flipped. I genuinely rate it as one of the more fun layouts in the land and it is set to improve further as the recent greens renovation, which we cover in ‘The Starter’ pages overleaf, fully beds in over the next year.
Arabian Ranches’ decision to resurface its greens with Platinum TE Paspalum grass, flown all the way from Georgia in the U.S., illustrates that established clubs run the risk of becoming irrelevant if they don’t continually evolve in this incredibly competitive region.
That fact is also again reflected in this issue, our sixth biennial Top 10 Courses in the Middle East special. Spoiler alert: Arabian Ranches hasn’t made the cut but that’s no slight on the Troon-International managed layout, rather a reflection of how much quality golf is concentrated in a relatively small geographic footprint.
Other big name clubs have dropped out or failed to ascent to the giddy heights of the top 10. There will be public glee, private disappointment and possibly even wails of consternation at the final line-up but it merely highlights the credence with which the rankings, part of the globally adopted and respected Golf Digest ranking, are viewed. It’s also why the top 10 continues to be such an intriguing debate. After all, one golfer’s desert links layout is another player’s inner city desert parkland.
A special thanks to the 26 judges that contributed to this lovingly laborious and ultimately thankless task. Their collective work reflects how lucky we are to live and play in one of the planet’s most desirable golf destinations.
It’s a region where you’ll be spoiled whether you tee it up on a top 10 course or one that would surely rank that highly in plenty of other countries around the world.
Just watch out for those devilish desert lies.