California Golf Club of San Francisco
San Francisco, California
In 2007 the California Golf Club of San Francisco, one of the Bay Area's oldest and most respected private clubs, was completely renovated under the direction of Kyle Phillips Golf Course Design. The original A. Vernon Macan design was architecturally restored within the current property boundaries, using 1927 as a benchmark, when Dr. Alister Mackenzie re-bunkered the course.
Del Paso Country Club
Sacramento, California
Del Paso Country Club celebrated its 90th anniversary when the new course redesigned by Kyle Phillips opened for play July 2006. Founded in 1916, Del Paso once hosted tournaments that included legendary players such as Sir Henry Cotton and Tommy Armour, as well as the 1982 US Women's Open. The architectural personality of the original course designed by Scotsman John Black has been maintained while regaining its championship status.
Dundonald Links
Loch Lomond Golf Club, Troon
This Kyle Phillips link course can be added to the list of Royal Troon, Prestwick and Western Gailes, all connected by the historic Ayrshire rail line. Making its debut when the world of golf comes to Troon for The Open Championship in 2004, Dundonald has already been mooted as the future venue for the future venue for the Scottish Open.
Golf Eichenheim
Kitzbuhel-Aurach
The majestic Wilder Kaiser or "Wild King" mountain range serves as the backdrop for the Par Five, Tenth Hole at Golf Eichenheim. This Kyle Phillips design is the site of the Austrain Masters and is already one of the top-rated courses in Austria.
Kingsbarns Golf Links
St. Andrews
Near St. Andrews, Scotland, Kingsbarns is a magnificent seaside links course ranked among the Top 50 courses in the world by Golf Magazine 2001. It also received Golf Digest's Best New International Course in February 2001. Kingsbarns opened July 2000 and began hosting the Dunhill Links Championship in 2001.
The PGA of Sweden National Golf Resort
Troup
Only 30 minutes from Copenhagen, Denmark and 15 minutes from Malmo, Sweden, this scenic southern location offers players a longer golf season. This spectacular facility features the highest quality golf and training experience in Scandinavia, consisting of two new Kyle Phillips Golf Course Design championship courses and a nine hole short course. The Links Course, with its classic links-style architecture and traditional fescue grasses opens for play in May 2009.
The Grove
London
Beautifully situated along the Grand Union Canal on the site of a 17th Century English Estate, this Kyle Phillips course has been designed in a traditional English style. This course is part of a 300 acre five-star country estate located within 40 minutes of London's West End.
Incline Village Championship & Mountain Course
Lake Tahoe, Nevada
Located on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The Championship Course at Incline Village enjoys views of Lake Tahoe and the majestic Sierra Nevada Mountains. Originally designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1964, the course was completely remodeled by Kyle Phillips and reopened in the fall of 2004.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Imagine a ride in one of the first Ferraris, and being driven by the car’s creator, Enzo Ferrari.
You could ask him about the distinctive roar of the engine, the uncomfortable seats, and twiddle the knobs until he responded with a stream of invectives.
I had a similar experience recently when I played a round of golf with Kyle Phillips, the architect of Yas Links Golf Club.
Kyle who? you might be asking. The world of golf architecture is split in two: on one side Arnold Palmer; Jack Nicklaus; Ernie Els; even Tiger Woods – legendary names of golf recognised the world over; and in the other camp Pete Dye; Robert Trent Jones; and Kyle Phillips – hardly household names.
However, mention Kyle Phillips to golfers and even granite-like Irishmen get a tear in their eye and start to wax lyrical. “The course is fantastic, you can run balls in, they’ve got lots of great run-offs,” says Graeme McDowell, the US Open champion and Ryder Cup star who played the course this week. “You can hit lots of different shots in and around the greens. I think Kyle has created something pretty cool here.”
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Abdullah Al Naboodah almost managed to give his 104 invited friends the ultimate links experience in the middle of the desert as the latest edition of the Emirates Airline Invitational proved to be a major success in its first outing at Yas Links Abu Dhabi.
That list of 104 included 52 top professionals from the European Tour, including the world No.1 Lee Westwood and the reigning US Open champion and world No.4 Graeme McDowell.
The Kyle Phillips-designed Yas Links is a true links course, and that likeness was enhanced by the overcast and breezy conditions.
It even rained a bit, but the occasional showers were too short-lived to make it too uncomfortable for the players.
And one man who tamed the course despite the tough playing conditions was South African Retief Goosen, who gave enough indication of his current form with an eight-under par 64 round, which was enough to win him the top professional prize.
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Retief Goosen got his season off to the perfect start by winning the Pros event at the Emirates Airline Invitational Hosted by Abdullah Al Naboodah at Yas Links Golf Club, Abu Dhabi, as England cricket legend Michael Vaughan and playing partner Ross McGowan scooped the Pro-Am two-man Team prize.
The Goose warmed up for his first outing on The European Tour in 2011 – this week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship – in stunning style, shooting a round of 8-under-par 64 that included seven birdies and a scintillating eagle at the at the 11th with just one bogey at the 17th.
The South African only entered the event last Thursday and had never played Kyle Phillips’ delightful Yas Links course before but after experiencing at first hand the unique and much-lauded atmosphere generated by the region’s most prestigious Pro-Am he’s more than happy he decided to take part in the event.
“It was my first round here so maybe that was a good thing – I didn’t know where all the trouble was,” said the two-time US Open champion. “I just tried to hit good shots, played solid golf, putted well and hit a lot of shots close to the pin. The course obviously suited my game quite nicely. I was a late entry so I think I made the right decision to play.
“Yas Links is a beautiful layout, it hasn’t been open very long but it’s in really great shape. It can get tough – when the wind blows hard round here it can get really difficult. The greens are also obviously very sloping so they can be very tricky.
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Wednesday, January 19, 2011
With the opening of new courses at Yas and Saadiyat in 2010, Abu Dhabi has laid down its marker as a top golf destination. As in previous years, the venue for the European Tour HSBC Championship is the Abu Dhabi National (Thursday to January 23), but Yas Links stages an exciting hors d’oeuvre on Monday. The No 1 golfer in the world, Lee Westwood, and the US Open champion, Graeme McDowell, head a line up of tour professionals for the invitational Pro-Am hosted by the Dubai entrepreneur Abdullah Al Naboodah. Half the Dh1.8 million purse will go to local charities and half to charities chosen by the winning professionals. Even if you’re invited, you won’t beat these guys, but you can join them at home and on other iconic courses around the world.
2. Yas Links, Yas Island, Abu Dhabi
In golf’s rich global pageant, links status is the ultimate accolade but imitators in distant lands rarely achieve the real deal. Key ingredients are sand, sea, “natural” landscaping and an absence of intrusive real estate. Site selection and investment can supply the first three, but the fourth is harder in a necessarily commercial climate. Opened last March, Yas Links are within sight of the F1 Circuit and Ferrari World but there are no fairway villas. Blazing sun insists this is not Scotland, but walking hard past fairways, looking for errant balls in hairy rough and missing putts on huge greens provides a traditional ambiance. The American architect Kyle Phillips, who established gilt-edged links credentials with Kingsbarns, 10km from St Andrews, has worked a similar magic on a course acclaimed as “the best in the Middle East” by Golf Course Architecture magazine.
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Thursday, January 13, 2011
Emirates Airline has been unveiled as the Title Partner of The Invitational Hosted by Abdullah Al Naboodah to be played at Yas Links Golf Club, Abu Dhabi, on Monday, January 17. This is the fifth running of the event, after two years at the Four Seasons Golf Club, Dubai and two years at Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club. The one-day tournament is universally recognised as one of the most popular and prestigious Pro-Ams in golf and with Emirates Airline taking up the title partnership the event has taken off as a world-class golf tournament.
The event is played in a better-ball format and among the 52 European Tour Professionals taking part – one Tour Pro per pair – there are 41 European Tour Champions, 11 Ryder Cup players, three Major Champions and the World No.1. This year the Emirates Airline Invitational, will be the curtain-raiser for the four-tournament European Tour Middle East Swing.
Abdullah Al Naboodah is delighted at Emirates’ support, saying: “Emirates Airline’s Title Partnership is great news for The Invitational. “We have been successful in building a base of select international brands as Premier Partners and Partners over the past few years but to go into our fifth year with the addition of Emirates Airline as Title Partner is a huge step forward. “The Emirates Airline Invitational will benefit the Pro-Am, and particularly the charities that we – and the Professional Tour players – support. It really does take the Pro-Am to a new level and establishes the event as a world-class golf tournament.”
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Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Adam Lawrence reckons Kyle Phillips may have built the Gulf’s first great course.
Golf in the Middle East is an odd beast. Maybe it’s inevitable; after all, a desert environment in which temperatures often rise about 50 Celsius is hardly an obvious location for a game that grew up on the cool and damp coast of Scotland.
But it’s not just the incongruity of playing in the desert that makes Gulf golf peculiar. Nowhere else in the world does the game feel quite so much like a trophy asset, built to elevate the status of a destination rather than necessarily as a place for golfers to play the game they love.
The rapid development of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Oman et al, accelerated by the wealth provided by oil and the fear of what will happen when it runs out, has brought golf to the region. But it has been a particular type of golf – almost exclusively based around the sale of housing, with the compromises to the golf courses that invariably follow that model around the world. Only a couple of courses have been built without integrated real estate, and one of those – Emirates Golf Club, the region’s first showpiece – is now having housing retro-fitted.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the golf and real estate model, even though it has taken a big hit in the last two years. But very few golfers, presented with two otherwise equal courses, one of which runs through a housing development, and the other of which is core, would pick the housing course as their favourite. The needs of golf and housing are not the same, however hard the masterplanner tries to balance them, and it’s inevitable that he who pays the piper – in other words, the real estate buyers – should call the tune.
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Kingsbarns and Loch Lomond top the 2011 Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses of Great Britain and Ireland list.
GB&I Modern Courses: 1960 and later
#1 Kingsbarns
Kingsbarns, Scotland, 1999
Hole 6
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