Phil Buys An Arizona Course And Other Notes About The State Of AZ Country Clubdom

Thanks to reader John for Peter Corbett's look at the state of golf clubs in Scottsdale and he reports a lot of membership and dues numbers, very little of it encouraging for developers but great for golfers. He also reveals this recent course purchase:

"This is about the low-water mark I've ever seen," he said.

Scottsdale's Sanctuary Golf Course was sold in the past month to Phil Mickelson and his agent, Steve Loy, for $2.2 million, a price far below its value of five years ago, Garrett said.

Brad Klein, a GolfWeek magazine editor, said the problem at Phoenix and Scottsdale golf clubs is that real-estate development subsidizes the golf operations.

When members take over the golf cub from the real-estate developer, they are forced to cut operating costs or tax themselves to maintain the courses at a high level, he said.

"There is a statement in the industry that the third owner makes the money," Klein said.

The third owner buys a course for $4 million that costs $20 million to build and $4 million to operate annually, he said.

Callaway's Dreary Sales News Offset By Rumor Of Joint Acushnet Push As Final Bids Are Due

Miracles do happen! And on a Friday of a dreadful earnings report to boot. Thank God Wall Street is above the Friday news dump shenanigans we see from politicians.

From Reuters:

Blackstone Group LP (BX.N) is teaming up with Callaway Golf Co (ELY.N) for a possible bid for Fortune Brands Inc's (FO.N) golf business, two sources familiar with the matter said.

A deal could be worth up to $1 billion, one of those sources said. Final bids for the auction, which has attracted interest from Asian bidders, are due on May 9, that source added.

Meanwhile, they freed up some cash by selling three Carlsbad buildings to help pay the fees of two Blackstone junior associates working on the purported bid, reports Pat Maio.

The buildings were sold in March but leased back as part of the company's global plan to reduce more than $84 million in expenses since it launched a cost savings program five years ago.
George Fellows, president and chief executive officer of Callaway, and Brad Holiday, chief financial officer, said in an interview that the golf equipment maker still has $35 million to $40 million left to shave in expenses by 2013.

"It doesn't stop there," Fellows said. "You always look to further improve the value of the company."

Thought I'd get through this without a v-word dropping. Oh well.

Now, I don't know a lot about business, but why would a successful private equity firm team with a fledgling golf company want to buy a successful golf company? Please, help me here?

The R11 As A Foul Pole

Normally I cringe at the placement of advertising in ballparks but you have to love when they incorporate ads as part of the quirk of a park, as Taylor Made and the Padres have done this week.

“All developers sort of possess that similar sense of invincibility."

Martin Kaufman profiles developer Lyle Anderson, who is remarkably frank about the project--Hokuli’a on Hawaii’s Kona Coast--that essentially brought his empire down, and also reports that the mastermind behind Desert Highlands, Desert Mountain and Loch Lomond is putting together financing for an "eco-friendly" development in Scottsdale.

Anderson says Hokuli’a was “outselling the market 2 to 1” when it launched in the late 1990s.

Hokuli’a was more than just another development to Anderson. Kizziar says the developer had a “spiritual involvement” with the land, immersing himself in the native Hawaiians’ history and traditions. There were numerous burial sites on the property, and Kizziar says Anderson made sure descendants had access to those sites, even building lava rock walls around some of them.

Then came a lawsuit from Kona residents claiming that the property, which was zoned as agricultural land, needed to be reclassified as urban land, a process that can take years. In 2003, more than five years after Anderson secured zoning permits to build Hokuli’a, state Circuit Court Judge Ronald Ibarra sided with the residents and ordered a halt to development.

By that time, according to the ruling, Hokuli’a already had sold 190 lots and poured $136 million into developing the site.

In 2006, Ibarra approved a settlement of the lawsuit, but the damage had been done.

“We won, but really (the activists) won because they took six years of the greatest market we ever had and we were (left) on the bench,” Anderson says. “That really hurt. It certainly ran up my debts with the bank. That was a difficult thing.”

Fortune CEO Bullish On Acushnet Takeover

Martinne Geller and Dhanya Skariachan of Reuters talk to Fortune Brands CEO Bruce Carbonari, who calls the firesale of the Acushnet/Titleist wing of his company "a robust process." He cites four groups of potential buyers.

"There are really four groups of people that we believe will be part of the process -- we think it will be a robust process," Fortune Brands Chief Executive Officer Bruce Carbonari said on Monday at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit in Chicago.

He expects interest from multinational companies, which could include rivals such as Nike Inc (NKE.N) or Adidas (ADSGn.DE), private equity firms, Asian or Middle Eastern sovereign investors and high net-worth individuals.

"This is a very unusual asset. There's people out there who have a real passion for the game," Carbonari said. He declined to say whether the company had received actual bids from these players.

You have to assume though that a "high net-worth individual" has submitted a bid since round 1 ended Friday. Who could it be?

"Forstmann's lawyers said he never would have bet against Woods since IMG represented him and would benefit if Woods won tournaments."

Thanks to Pete Finch for Tweeting William Cohan's in-depth look at the lawsuits filed against IMG owner Ted Forstmann. The story has remained off the radar as a TMZ item. But this gets into details which, while still leaving suit-filer James Agate's credibility in some doubt, leaves little question that Forstmann loves to bet, helped put Agate in debt with the IRS and Forstmann was undoubtedly betting on things he shouldn't have been betting on as the IMG leader. Worst of all, he Forstmann is not denying that he ran his bets through Agate, who worked through bookies in Vegas and Costa Rica.

Legal or not, after Forstmann bought IMG, which represents major sports stars, and then kept placing bets through Agate -- often on IMG's clients -- his gambling fairly reeked of poor judgment. The Tennis Integrity Unit has said such betting violates its rules but that Forstmann's betting occurred before its creation; an NCAA spokesperson says Forstmann is not under its jurisdiction "but that the expectation is that those providing services to the NCAA will not wager on sports." While Agate, by all accounts, including his own, seemed to grow increasingly desperate and unstable, Forstmann has come around to the view that he made a mistake; he has since instituted a ban on college-sports gambling at IMG.

There wasn't one before?

As for the explosive charge of betting against Tiger, it still sounds sketchy. Though not sketchy enough to likely offend Woods or any other client learning that the boss could be rooting against you.

Agate also claims Forstmann bet "several times against" Tiger Woods, also an IMG client, to lose to Vijay Singh, another (now former) IMG client and onetime friend of Forstmann's. Forstmann's lawyers said he never would have bet against Woods since IMG represented him and would benefit if Woods won tournaments. Agate's charge "defies logic and common sense," they wrote. (Of course, by betting for Federer in 2007, Forstmann was necessarily betting against IMG client Nadal.)

But how much does IMG really benefit from Tiger winning tournaments?

On a less important note, there was this:

That's when Agate gave a copy of the proposed suit to gossip website TMZ. Forstmann was served the lawsuit, plus a copy of the still-unfiled complaint with the betting records, two days later on a Saturday in the parking lot of Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, near his home in Southampton, N.Y.

A few weeks later, hearing nothing from Forstmann, Agate filed the amended complaint with the betting information. All hell broke loose.