ROAD WARRIORS

By Brett Avery

Halfway around the globe, an American and a Canadian spread the ministry of golf from the ground up.

Picture the Acapulco cliff-diving cove, only this U-shaped inlet is 100 yards at the mouth and 200 yards stem to stern. Everything's jagged coral, wind, water, desolation. The word "inhospitable" springs to mind, but that's going to change.

You're at 7 o'clock, the Pacific Ocean is high noon. At 5 o'clock is a 10-foot-high ridge, from which an eight-foot piece of polyvinyl chloride pipe protrudes from the ground. It carries the designation "21," for the 21st hole at Bird Island, a 27-hole course nearing groundbreaking. Four similar PVC pipes are strung along the cove's left side: figure three tees and then the last, near the point, for the green. For a moment you see an awesome, windswept hole, teetering on the precipice, where the waves far below swallow any stray shot.

Or so you'd assume. Until course architect Robin Nelson ambles over and points to the opposite side of the cove, to about 1 o'clock. "There's the green," he says with nonchalance, pointing to a shelf wedged into the cove's opposite corner, a jagged sliver 20 feet below the rim that bears another length of PVC. It is a hole kids manufacture, given a kettle of mashed potatoes. It's so difficult to reach the green site, inching down a sheer face of coral, that it doesn't even appear on the site's topographic map.

The first time Nelson saw this property, on the remotest corner of Saipan, the owners brought him to this spot by helicopter — because the clearing at 7 o'clock was the only place to squeeze down the chopper. "I just said, 'Oh my God, that's the par 3,' " Nelson recalls. "The building is the anticlimactic part. It's the discovery where you say 'holy bleep' that makes it all worthwhile."

Forgive Nelson's expletive, for confronted with Bird Island's 21st, it's the only imaginable reaction. It must be how Jack Neville felt staking out Pebble Beach's 18th, how Alister Mackenzie and Bob Jones envisioned Amen Corner, how Donald Ross prided his luck at being handed a pristine Pinehurst.

And, chances are, you'll never play Bird Island.

Robin Nelson, a golf course architect for nearly 20 years, long ago realized his portfolio would remain invisible to all but the most intrepid of America's golfers. Even among his peers his work is largely unknown. Ron Whitten, the architecture editor for Golf Digest and Golf World, who spends his days traveling to evaluate courses, admits he has set foot on only one of Nelson's works — and it's in Hawaii. "I haven't seen any of those exotic courses that they have on the other side of the Pacific," Whitten says.

Nelson knows full well these layouts are not around the corner, because he commuted dozens of times to each during their construction. Reaching Bird Island requires a 51/2-hour flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu, then 71/2 hours to Guam, then a right turn and a 45-minute hop to Saipan, then a 40-minute drive that ends on a jarring dirt strip. From the mainland, Bird Island is one of Nelson's closest non-Hawaiian works.

No matter. The 47-year-old has become an icon in faraway lands, with works by his architectural firm dotting Australia, China, France, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and heading for a half-dozen other nations. The sense of discovery — of being latter-day Johnny Appleseeds of golf — keep Nelson and his 37-year-old Canadian partner, Neil Haworth, devoted to building courses in remote lands.

"When I saw first-hand the way these countries were taking to golf, it was exciting and I wanted to be a part of it," Nelson says. "Remember what it was like when you first started playing golf? You couldn't get enough of it. That's what was happening all over the Pacific Rim. These guys had been bitten by the golf bug. When I started my own firm, I knew that's where I wanted to be."

What their States-bound counterparts don't know would slay them. Sure, a handful of designers have ventured into this part of the world, mostly players with name value who lend their images and little else to a design. By now, though, everyone but Nelson and Haworth have literally abandoned the Pacific Rim in the past year as currencies were sucked into a black hole and economies teetered. Nelson and Haworth, passports bulging, continue to work the territory with success. And they have found amazing sites wherever they've brought the game.

Trying to convey the magnificence of these plots is like describing magenta to a blind person; something's lost in the translation. There's Mangilao on Guam, another rugged stretch along the shore with the mother of all island greens, slammed by high waves during typhoon season. There's Shen Zhen in China, ringed by burgeoning skyscrapers, and nearby Shen Zhen Xili, nestled into an undisturbed valley 20 minutes away. Or Tiara Malaka, a black-tee back-breaker (Slope 148.5) worthy of consideration for a world ranking, that sits on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Then again, trying to convey the punishing nature of their monthly itineraries is like explaining how connecting one-hour flights through Atlanta or Chicago or Dallas are actually a piece of cake. Bird Island? It's the first stop of a jump-around week of visiting projects, either envisioned, under construction or complete, in six lands. It's a typical trip for Nelson, based in Hawaii, and Haworth, who calls Singapore home.

Road warrior story No. 1 (and they have dozens): Nelson flies into Manila to check a project a few years ago, jumps into a cab. Ensnared in traffic en route to the course, the cabbie asks if it's Nelson's first visit to the Philippines. "No," Nelson sighs. "How many times have you been here?" the cabbie asks and Nelson, with nothing better to do, counts passport stamps. The total: 35.

Consider for a moment that their core "territory" girdles a half-dozen time zones — yet has only about 600 courses, roughly the number opened in the U.S. in the past 15 months. It's no wonder, then, that they wind up staking a course or inspecting its grading during daylight, then flying after sundown. Another day, another immigration form.

"I almost didn't take this job because of a fear of flying," Haworth admits. He was the Canadian college golf champ in 1986, a landscape architecture graduate from the University of Guelph under apprenticeship with Graham Cooke in Montreal when he heard Nelson and Rodney Wright, then design partners, were seeking associates in 1991. Six months earlier he'd nearly landed a job with Mark McCumber's outfit, but immigration problems soured the deal. Canada's building boom was slacking, but Japan was rocking and everyone in that neighborhood was posturing to get into the game.

When Haworth flew to Hawaii to meet with Nelson for a weekend, Haworth had been outside Canada mostly for family vacations. He'd studied for a semester in London — a base from which he played almost all the great courses in the United Kingdom. What Nelson and Haworth discovered was a kindred spirit. Nelson had joined Robert Muir Graves' firm upon graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1970s, then after three years joined Ron Fream and succumbed to the overseas bug. In 1983, Nelson and Wright helped the Hawaii-based landscape architecture firm of Belt, Collins and Associates open a course-architecture group.

This was not your typical sweaty-palms job interview for Haworth, and it's indicative of the pair's wry manner. One of their promotional tools is a parody of a rock group's T-shirt, a listing of the firm's courses as a concert-spoofing "Golf for the New Millennium World Tour." Although they had spoken at length on the telephone, it wasn't until Haworth arrived in Hawaii late Friday night of that Super Bowl weekend that he realized Nelson had already reached his conclusion.

"Every once in a while he would lean over and ask, 'How old are you?' or 'Where'd you go to school?'" Haworth says with a chuckle. "He had asked me for a grading plan, and I'd worked one up for the interview, and then he hardly looked at it. At one point he told me, 'I just wanted to make sure you don't have three arms or three eyes.' But he was just great. He can get you enthused about golf course design so easily. It's definitely contagious."

What Haworth did have, Nelson confirmed, was a similarly attuned eye for design and, perhaps more importantly, the temperament to handle foreign travel and the inconsistencies of job sites. Since their combined names go on all but the rare project, the relationship would more closely resemble a marriage. It's one thing to decide a bunker should go short and right of a green. It's quite another thing to have similar shaping philosophies so that it appears ambidextrous hands were on the pen when the design was drawn.

Road warrior story No. 2: Haworth flies to Hong Kong and is commuting to a site in Shen Zhen, China, when his cab runs into traffic that doesn't move for 20 minutes. Wanting to use his time wisely, Haworth exits the cab, walks a few feet to the chair of a barber who had set up shop on the shoulder of the road, and gets a haircut. When he re-enters the cab, it hasn't moved an inch. "And it was a good haircut," he claims.

Consider the routine of a States-bound architect. The course's backer arranges funding from a local bank, somebody he's perhaps known for years. The architect hires contractors and shapers who have worked on several of his previous projects, and who have played golf for years. They'll use machinery for nearly every task. The architect can anticipate problems that arose in other projects, since most aspects of a job in South Dakota translate readily to a site in, say, Georgia. Think homogenized milk.

Now consider what Nelson and Haworth face. The course's backer might not live in the country or may have arranged financing through lenders in a third nation. Outside of a handful of top-line foremen and shapers, the hundreds of workers who build the course virtually by hand cannot contemplate what the finished product looks like and have never heard of golf. You don't know pressure, Haworth says, until contemplating moving a cluster of bunkers six yards — and the hundreds of workers who will move those mounds by hand are standing nearby. Then there's the language barrier, and the possibility that in divergent cultures the hand gesture that signaled approval at yesterday's site is an obscene gesture to the workers at today's site.

"A lot of our job is educating everyone in how to do this properly," Nelson says. "We have to take more time talking about why something in a job may cost more, because cutting corners can bring up real problems later. And in some instances, jobs that have been done in a country before ours have not followed the best environmental principles.

"There was a job in the Philippines, where the owner presented me with what was basically a word-for-word version of the guidelines for course construction adopted by the ASGCA (American Society of Golf Course Architects). He asked me, 'What do you think of this?' I told him, 'Even if you hadn't brought these to me, we would have followed these in how we built your course.' "

Road warrior story No. 3: Project in Indonesia. Last touches before opening day. Door to the construction office bursts open, in sprints a local. In a panic, he's discovered a huge problem. For all the millions of rupiah spent on the project, everyone forgot to supply the holes in the ground. Where at this late date, he asks in a cold sweat, can they be obtained?

There is one bugaboo around which headaches revolve: water. Without water, grass can't grow. If the water is of poor quality, or loaded with salt, it can stunt growth or invite disease.

That's why Nelson and Haworth are ahead of their contemporaries when it comes to employing exotic strains of turf such as paspalum, an Australian hybrid of bermudagrass that requires a quarter of the chemicals and water of domestic grasses while sneering at brackish water. Anywhere there is a promontory — the 12th at Mangilao on Guam comes to mind, with its plateau green awash with spray during storms — paspalum is the best answer.

Then there's the matter of taking water from the course. If it rains in hellacious amounts, as it does during monsoon months, turf that seems solidly in place can wash away in a torrent. If a drainage system backs up, the stagnant water can suffocate the grass beneath. A realtor preaches location; an architect preaches drainage.

How many courses in the U.S. have tabletop fairways, or ones with subtle rolls? They would never survive in the Far East, where workers use pick and shovel to lay miles of tile and piping. Consider that this trip would have included Myanmar (the former Burma), but the project there had seen rain for 58 of the previous 60 days. That's not a fluke but a way of life, a Weather Channel geek's dream.

Road warrior story No. 4: Shen Zhen Xili, the toniest club in China, is adding nine holes to its existing 27, using land along a river cutting through the property. Two weeks before Nelson and Haworth visit the site, an unanticipated storm dumped 1.7 inches in 25 minutes. Ex-patriot job foremen scrambled to open levees. As they cranked the wheels, they determined the storm's intensity: a three-pigger, for the number of squealing animals that swept past them, from an upstream piggery, in the two minutes it took to open the levees.

Shen Zhen typifies what was, and what again could be, along the Pacific Rim. Back in the late 1980s, when the leaders in Beijing realized Hong Kong would be coming home to roost within a few years, they established the Shen Zhen Economic Zone, north of the New Territories. That land, about equal in size to Hong Kong itself, was envisioned as a spring training camp for capitalism. By the time one of the British Empire's jewels was handed back to the Chinese in 1997, the home team would be able to play the money game.

So Shen Zhen started out as a big field ringed by a few mountains and not many people. The first time Nelson and Haworth visited as the 1990s were getting started, there were 30,000 residents, the roads were dirt and the tallest building would have gotten beaten up at recess. Today the population is pushing seven figures, the highest skyscraper in China looms near the horizon and the main drags are slick six-lane divided highways. Tastefully tree-lined, no less.

What makes for a jarring sight is that while the Western creature-comforts creep into Chinese territory — and one could argue the creature-comforts aren't better than the way the locals do things — much of the labor still is done by hand. An example is Shen Zhen Country Club, a 27-hole project designed by Isao Aoki in the mid-1980s being given a contemporary look by Nelson and Haworth. On this morning, workers are seeding the tees using cowgrass turf cut out of a nearby course.

The blocks, which were carved from the ground using a machine, are trucked to the site, then broken up by hand into seedlings by a team of a half-dozen women, then carried in baskets by men and distributed to a row of 25 women who, crouching, stuff the seedlings into furrows. Cowgrass spreads so vigorously the tees, about 10 percent covered when planted, will be completely enveloped by new growth in six weeks, when they will be mowed using combustion-engine mowers.

Anyone infected by the Ugly American Syndrome — and if you believe you're immune, you're mistaken — would look at the process, consider the middle steps wasteful and ditch the crouching locals in favor of laying sod. But that would go against one of the big rules Nelson and Haworth have learned: Never impose your culture.

"The Ugly American Syndrome really makes you cringe," Nelson says. "When I was first out here and then I'd go back to San Francisco (where he was raised), I'd realize that the people here were really gentle and much more friendly over here. I'd get home and I couldn't wait to get back here."

Road warrior story No. 5: Dinner time, Shen Zhen. Nelson and Haworth are out with the ex-pats from Xili. Problem is, nobody speaks Chinese well enough to order with certainty, and none of the wait staff speaks English. The solution? Take the ubiquitous cellular phone, call a Xili employee and ask him to order for 10, then hand the phone to the waitress.

Saturday arrives and, after an evening flight from Hong Kong's soon-to-close Kai Tak Airport, they're in Singapore to visit the firm's office. Haworth's base is a shophouse (business on the ground floor, residence above in colonial days) and it's not unlike the Honolulu office Nelson calls home in that it's crammed with oodles of rolled-up maps, routings and sketches.

They're joined by Brett Mogg, an Australian who has worked out of the Singapore office for a few years, and the trio begins reviewing plans for a course on the other side of the island. The rarity is that the trio is looking at the plans side-by-side-by-side instead of by e-mail or fax; the last time they were in the same room was the previous year in Ireland, during the group's annual meeting. The only missing designer is Matt Mitchell, holding down the fort in the Seattle office.

From there everyone piles into a rental car and drives three hours into Malaysia, to the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur and Bukit Cahaya, which translates into "the sanctuary." If Shen Zhen is a sign of what the Far East was and can be, Bukit Cahaya is what the region is now — stuck in neutral.

The sign on the entry road proclaims "There can only be one Cahaya," but at present there can only be four-fifths of a Cahaya. When the economies went sour and the U.S. dollar started steamrolling currencies, the project's backer came up short by 8 million ringgit ($2 million U.S.). It almost breaks the trio's hearts to come here, to see another reminder of the jobs still on the drawing board (eight projects in the Philippines, three others in Malaysia, to name but a few). All the work stalled in a two-month stretch, and until new money is found it's 50-50 that they'll resume and be completed.

If you knew the right people, you could play nine holes at Cahaya. Those would be the holes that were finished before the money dried up, the ones that have been maintained by a skeleton crew for 10 months. There are five or six more that were within a month of completion, but they sit neglected. The rest are a pile of mud. Not only that, but the luxury homes that were envisioned by a dozen respected architects from around the world also stopped in mid-pour. They only exist as hulking concrete hulls, or holes in the ground, or uncleared ground.

The playable holes are exceptional, although barren of any amenity save a flagstick. The 11th is framed by a gigantic fig tree beside a lake. The 12th is a stunner, a 190-yarder over a 65-foot ravine filled with tropical forest undergrowth. Monkeys scamper down a 90-foot palm tree beside the 14th. But just as the anticipation of a buckle-busting finish grows, the holes disappear and the path turns to dust.

"It's not so much depressing as discouraging," Mogg says. "It's like running the marathon and then in the last half-mile some guy jumps out of the crowd and hits you in the head. It was just like getting pole-axed."

Road warrior story No. 6: Nelson cannot resist a two-day visit to The Olympic Club for the U.S. Open. He played Olympic in his wonder years, and it helped form his impression of classic architecture. One day he's standing in the media tent, and no one recognizes him, although he recognizes many names of the writers walking past — folks who have said nice things about his Hawaiian projects. Later that day Rees Jones enters the tent, and within 20 minutes dozens of writers have stopped by to chat.

After all their time on the road, Nelson and Haworth are beginning to look at North America with a wistful eye. Traveling this territory has its adventures, but it's also aging them prematurely. It would be nice to hop a connecting flight through L.A. or Detroit or Pittsburgh every once in a while. Halworth misses "Hockey Night in Canada" telecasts, Nelson pines to spend more time with his wife and two daughters. And it would be nice to have the folks back home recognize them, to give them a pat on the back for their work. Heck, to play their work might be enough.

"If we came back to the States, we'd have to start all over again," Nelson muses. "Unless you are a known entity, you're not going to get much work right away. We are successful because we work hard. But not many people back home know that."

The ones who visit Bird Island will, as will the folks who find Shen Zhen or Kuala Lumpur. There are millions of people discovering the game, and Nelson and Haworth are bringing that message to the world. What's missing? For the folks back home to discover Nelson and Haworth.