From early conversations to storm damage to opening night — how TGL came together (ESPN.com)
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TGL hired three golf course design companies (Agustín Pizá, Beau Welling and Nicklaus Design) to create 30 original holes. TGL said they were “inspired by authentic golf landscapes such as links, canyons, coastal, deserts and tropical settings.” Working in a virtual world allowed the designers to build holes that were out of the ordinary as well.
The par-4 “Flex” is nestled on an active volcano, and “The Spear” has a floating tee box, landing area and GreenZone.
“There’s a certain geometry to golf,” said Welling, whose firm designed the PGA Frisco course in Texas and Pelican Golf Club in Florida, among others. “There’s a certain dispersion that these guys hit golf balls. You’re trying to replicate risk and reward and the choices and all the golf architecture sort of concepts.”
Designing golf holes for a virtual course was different from anything Welling had done before. He found that incorporating trees was more difficult than expected, but there was also more freedom to be creative because he didn’t have to worry about building an actual bridge to get golfers over a large body of water, canyon or lava.
Another advantage in working in a virtual world: Welling didn’t have to actually move dirt to make changes to the holes. It took only three or four keystrokes to make even dramatic alterations.
“I think what’s cool is that you can go do whatever you want in many, many ways,” Welling said. “There’s parts that are the same, but then there’s things that are radically different, in that you don’t have constraints that you would have in the real world.”
(Click for full story by Mark Schlabach at ESPN.com)