DORAL-RYDER OPEN

March 5, 1999

Greg Norman

GREG NORMAN: Do we go straight into Q and A or do you want me to talk about this?

GREG NORMAN: How many fairways hit? You want me to sit down for that one, Andrew? Can you guys see the boards here? It is a great honor for me to be up here doing this golf course because the Blue Monster has a reputation on its own and every time I play out there and I think about the credibility and the shots and the formidable golf course it has been, it has been hard to come over here to the White Course with 108 acres with a lot of water there and say, okay, how are we going to get a golf course that is comparable to the Blue Monster. Well, you just flip a coin, heads on the side of the Blue Monster; tails the other side. You have got to do two totally different golf courses. That is basically the theme of what you might see up here. I don't want to see any rough out here. I am a believer in making the golfers play, play it on the green grass, I like the feel of what happens out in the desert golf courses. You notice all this white stuff in here is going to be like yellow coquina sand. It will be firm, not waste bunkers but kind of like waste bunkers, but a different feel and different look to it. You miss the fairways, you are in the coquina. You hit the fairways, you are on the fairways. The other thing, if you look at the Blue Monster, there is a lot of bunkers, but they are huge bunkers. I wanted to get away from that theme, go to smaller bunkers, pot bunkers, make them -- they are everywhere in little clusters all over the place, still going to have a lot of sand, going to look different. The golf course, Blue Monster, measures 7,200. We will probably get 6,900 out of this one and really squeeze because out of the 108 acres, we only have 52 acres of grass. So it basically got coquina, water, 52 acres of grass. You will see one characteristic we put on here the triple green 11, 13 and 17, again we have to try and amalgamate the best use of the space we possibly can, so the way we did that, we put three greens in together there. The other thing we are going to do is basically make complete meridian vegetation. I mean, Royal Palms on one hole, Maypan Palms on other hole; Sable Palms, robilinis, all the natural vegetation that you see in Florida. We are going to intermingle on different holes. 18th hole and the hole and 1 hole will be basically the Royal Palm avenue. There is going to be a lot of Royals, going to look with the beauty of the trunks of the Royal Palm tree and yellow coquina and green grass and no rough. It is going to be an elegant feel about playing those golf holes. And you can see, we have joined up a couple of tees playing two tees together like 15 and 6, going to change them. We made a few changes out here today, 2 and 14 may join up, excuse me, 2 and 18 may join up together, to make it a little bit more user-friendly. Made a few more changes out there. We stretched the golf course out probably another 100, 120 yards this afternoon without even trying. So, the more time I spend on the property, the more you get to feel it, and we saved a lot of big ficus trees out there as well. Any questions?

GREG NORMAN: We have one hole pretty much the same. It is the 16th. This is where the members tees plays right now to the original -- to the green but we moved the tee back on the other side of the lake now it will be about a 200-yard shot. That is basically the only hole that has got any similarity to it. The green-side will be pretty much the same. But everything else is change it up.

GREG NORMAN: Just drive on the coquina. I hate cart path. You might have seen that at the Andersen when I landed on one, it went out-of-bounds, so, no cart path, no.

GREG NORMAN: I don't think it's ever been done. Basically we did it the guys sitting down talking about it because we needed to -- believe it or not, many of us were sitting on a plane Bob Collins and myself and Jason McCoy, and we did about three or four different routings each to figure out how do you fit a golf course in 108 acres full of water. So we just -- all of us got together and we just talked, talked, talked. We probably did about, I am guessing, maybe 15 different routings on this golf course, between all of us to come up with this and it is just -- with what Matt did there with just saying, okay, Greg, why don't we just put it all together in this one little area here. As you can see, when you are talking about playability of holes and the prevailing wind, all the shots here are pretty much safe from each other. This one here we just got to snake this green -- this is not going to be the actual layout of the green. We are just going to snake it a little bit more to get a little bit more protection from the prevailing winds coming out of the south from the second shot on 17. That is about it. Just by the configuration of the playability of the holes you can actually do it without getting into problems of one guy putting on the green and getting decked by a 7-iron or something like that.

GREG NORMAN: Again, this is all changing. What you see here I changed when I go out there. This will probably change again and again and again. One thing that I like to do is -- we do -- we pretty much do these basically for the Joel Paiges of the world. When would go out there on the golf courses, we build golf courses, we always change them by what you see and by what you feel. Like today for example, I moved this a little bit, I moved this a little bit. 15 has been moved a little bit. This has been moved a little bit. 2 and 18 are being moved. And this is only my second time on the golf course.

GREG NORMAN: Boys, how many square feet is triple green? 18,000 square feet.

GREG NORMAN: Within the year; correct?

GREG NORMAN: Yeah, this time down here, Steve, you have got so much of good growing season all year long, and as you can see 52 acres and no rough, so you pretty much are working with the same type of grass, Tifwall (phonetic) all the way through and GN-1, so it is not that difficult to get ready within that time period. The hard part basically is all the engineering, these lakes here, believe it or not, they are up a to 60 to 70-feet deep. So, when we go working to fill in certain areas, you have got a lot of work to do. Those lakes were dugout, I believe, for the fill for the golf course. So, engineering on this golf course is probably a little bit more sensitive than what we have on most others because most of the drainage -- there is a canal that runs down here and which pretty much runs down the drainage canal. This golf course does not drain into there. It drains basically into the ground water and the ground water takes it out into the ocean. This golf course does not drain into the canal, so from an engineering standpoint it is more of a gravity feed, ground water, and out to the ocean, that is how it works.

GREG NORMAN: I just like the look of it. Because again we want to make something totally different than what the Blue Monster is. So we just decided -- when you see a lot of the desert-type golf courses -- when I came down here the first time, we looked at it, we were tossing it around, what to do with the golf course, I said let us make this a desert theme, but here in Florida, and how do you do that? You use a coquina which is native Floridian coral rock basically, and then you bring in the theme of instead of cactus use the Royal palms and Florida vegetation. There will be an eight foot high fence going right around the perimeter of the golf course and the whole fence will be covered in either bouganvillea or lavender pinky purply color vine which will be a very full vine.

GREG NORMAN: Very much so, yeah.

GREG NORMAN: That is not my call. I can hand that off on to Joel?

JOEL PAIGE: We'd certainly like to be host a Championship event on the Great White. That is why we have asked Greg to make it championship caliber so whether it's a PGA TOUR event, SENIOR or a ladies made for TV, we expect to host an event on the course.

JOEL PAIGE: Putting me on the spot. I would say probably not. That is the Blue Monster; that is where it belongs.

GREG NORMAN: Pretty much all the greens now are push-up greens, buildup greens basically for the wet. Some of them we are going to take down. But again that is all the engineering, the drainage, how do you get the water off if you take the green down. I don't necessarily like to see the greens just stuck up out in the middle of nowhere. So a lot of greens, you feel like you are going to hit down on the shot, do you do that by lifting up the fairway 18 inches and dropping the green 12 inches to make a 30-inch difference between the two, you can do that. So they are the little things that we really look at when you play and you can walk up and, you know, I will be on a landing area like this height, I will be hitting down 18 inches, you really feel like you are going down a lot here in South Florida so that is how we play with the eye and play with the mind.

JOEL PAIGE: About 6 to $7 million, still zeroing in on the final number.

GREG NORMAN: Yes.

GREG NORMAN: Oh, Sugarloaf, well, that was a complete different golf course because it was all residential. Huge components in there where there were pockets of residential. I can't remember the exact acreage of Sugarloaf but it had to be up around 11, 12 hundred acres, total of the whole deal. So, 108 acres -- I think the only one that I think is as small as this would be Royal Perth. I think that they did it on 98 acres or 100 acres. They didn't have all this either. Marriott is doing a development all the way around the south and the southwestern corner right here; that is why this property got very, very confining for us because we didn't have the ability to use the holes that are here right now because Marriott is coming in with a timeshare.

GREG NORMAN: No, not really, I just picture putting a D8 right across it and start again. That is what I do. That is how I try and visualize it. But, you know, when you look at the layout, when you come like to 16, for example, this green setting is a beautiful green setting, so, why change it when you have got it there. That is the importance of coming out in a field like any time, I pretty much go to -- I mean I know I have gone to every golf course before we have done a layout, just a virgin piece of land. This one had a golf course on it. That is why it is important for the designer/builder to feel what the property is like before you take a tree down; understand where the wind direction is coming from all the time; then get out there, get your feet dirty in the mud and stuff, then come back and do your routing and that is why I think you come up with a very, very friendly layout because you have been there on the virgin piece of property.

GREG NORMAN: I won't stick to the number because there are probably going to be more at the end of it all. Again, when you go out there on the golf course, I mean, if you guys ever get a chance when we are down here, the guys who live in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, area it is actually worth the while to walk around with the guys and listen to what we say and what we see and what we feel because, like I say, a lot of this will change. I mean even the flow on the contours of these fairways here will change. They are there for a reason, yes, but when you get out there you can just make that adjustment by 30 inches here or five inches here or six inches there makes the whole golf course different playability. That is why when you walk in the field all the time, that is where I get my immense amount of enjoyment out of designing building golf courses for that sheer pleasure if you just triple off something by 4, 5 inches, it makes a huge difference on what happens with the golf ball for not just the pros but for everybody.

GREG NORMAN: Very much so, 18 is going to be about 480 yard, par 4, we are going to move this, but don't forget, the prevailing wind comes off the ocean which is coming from this section right here. So you are always going to get a little bit of a push. 18 will now end up pretty much like the second hole at Southern Hills which is one of the toughest driving holes in the game of golf because it is dead straight and it is very hard to set up on a dead-straight hole. Today what I did was just move this up here a little bit; move two down here a little bit so it is almost like a dead straight shot 480 yards. That is, again, from what Joel and KSL wanted, they wanted the opportunity of having a tournament here and you want to have a good finishing hole just like the 18TH on the Blue Monster. Okay? We happy? Thanks, Joel.

JOEL PAIGE: We are very excited about going into the new millennium. This is going to be opened around the first of the year as Greg mentioned. Also the point we want to emphasize the most is unlike the Blue, the Gold, the Silver, this is not a redesign. This is not a renovation. We handed the course to Greg and said make us a brand new course. Looking forward to opening the Great White. Thank you very much.