Though a latecomer to the Caribbean golf boom, Barbados has grabbed the spotlight by opening a string of acclaimed courses, and by luring Mike Weir, Colin Montgomerie and other PGA stars to a shootout next week that will be televised around the world.
Played at the posh Sandy Lane resort from Dec. 7 to 10, the World Golf Championships-Barbados World Cup will showcase the burgeoning industry of an island that until recently relied almost exclusively on a traditional sun, sand and sea tourism strategy.
Two-man teams representing 24 nations — including Canadians Weir and Jim Rutledge — will compete for a purse of $4-million (all amounts in U.S. dollars) in a PGA-sanctioned competition that was called the Canada Cup at its inception in 1953 at Montreal's Beaconfield Golf Club and renamed the World Cup in 1967.
“Barbados World Cup will send the message that we've arrived as a golf destination,” says Claire Jordan of Golf Barbados, a co-operative marketing board formed to promote golf tourism. “But it will also show that our island can successfully host a world-class sporting event. The goal is to establish Barbados as the Caribbean's leading country for sports and lifestyle tourism.”
The former British colony, which tomorrow celebrates the 40th anniversary of its independence, anticipates an even bigger publicity payoff in April when it hosts the final of the 2007 Cricket World Cup, as well as six other matches.
While Puerto Rico, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands rapidly built courses and prospered from the golf boom of the past three decades, Barbados contentedly slumbered as a relative backwater of the game.
Resorts were already prospering throughout a beautiful island of remarkable contrasts, from the windswept Atlantic coastline to vast meadows of sugar cane to the serene waters and white-sand beaches of the Caribbean coast, the destination of most vacationers.
The benefits of golf-course development were first seen in the early 1990s during the building of the Royal Westmoreland Golf and Country Club. The giant $400-million residential and resort complex, near the capital of Bridgetown, gave a tremendous boost to the island's construction industry. Designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., Royal Westmoreland's challenging course offers only limited tee times to golfers not staying on the property.
But the real breakthrough came in 2000 with the launch of the Barbados Golf Club, a picturesque 6,697-yard track a 25-minute drive down the coast from Bridgetown. Funded by both the government and private interests, the club offers green fees as low as $25 for locals, making the game affordable for almost everyone.
The cunningly designed Ron Kirby layout also addressed the widespread fear that golf course development would consume too much water in a nation with one of the world's lowest annual rainfalls. Rainwater is recycled by strategically placed run-offs that feed a small man-made lake positioned between the 7th and 16th holes.
Today, there are three new public-play courses in various stages of planning or construction throughout the island. Upon their completion, Barbados will be poised to challenge for dominance in the Caribbean golf market.
Barbados World Cup, the marquee event slated for broadcast to 140 nations, will be played at Sandy Lane's Country Club Course. The gorgeous Tom Fazio design overlooks the Caribbean Sea on the popular west coast — or Platinum Coast, as this playground of the rich and fabulous is known — 10 kilometres north of Bridgetown.
Sandy Lane made headlines in October of 2004 when Tiger Woods and guests Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan celebrated his wedding there.
Indeed, the 112-room resort, set in an ancient mahogany grove overlooking an idyllic crescent-shaped beach, has drawn the cream of international society since opening in 1961. Jacqueline Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis, Mick Jagger, Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, Frank Sinatra and David Niven have all walked the Italian marble floors of the neo-Palladian-style hotel.
