ON
THE SPOT
Cancun golf full of promise and pitfalls
RIVIERA MAYA, Mexico (June 27, 2005) - A certain segment of the population regards Cancun as the ultimate in sophisticated vacation fun. These are the same people who look at the beer bong as a greater invention than anything old Thomas Alva Edison came up with, Madden PS2 tournaments as the ultimate test of manhood and Will Farrell as the world's greatest hero.
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Nothing wrong with this. My little brother is a proud member of this Cancun-adoring base and he just graduated from college on the dean's list and is headed to a life of financial-firm bonuses.
It's just not the stuff of your typical golfing demographic. Cancun and golf seem to mesh about as well as Karl Rove and liberals. Cancun is the place to go for cheesy resorts with Budweiser-stained walls, cheap trinkets being hawked on the street and nightclubs where foam reigns. A wonderfully crafted par 4 is anything but par for the course.
"Cancun's Spring Break any time of the year,'' one already well-hydrated college kid explains waiting for a midmorning flight to this party town in the heart of June.
This is a flight where short skirts and long shorts are the norm, where a golf bag looks as out of place on the luggage conveyer as a bikini would in Baghdad.
Only, it's not long before you're being plucked out of the crowd of college students waiting for a ride in the endless shuttle van lines, taken to a new P.B. Dye course that's a short ride from one of the four Jack Nicklaus courses, which is short ride from the new Greg Norman course.
Don't look now, but Cancun is suddenly selling itself as a golf destination. Yes, that same Cancun that's the stuff of MTV dreams (and bad reality movies).
The motivation can be found in the green of U.S. dollars. The area's big resorts are tired of having to cater to college kids, who can be finicky with their bucks and hell on the cleaning crews.
"We're trying to draw a more affluent crowd to the
Maya-Cancun area,'' said Julio Viscontti, president of the
Cancun Golf Association. "We want to be about more than
just Spring Break. As a hotel general manager you want to
sell as many standard room rates as possible. Sometimes
now they have to drop that rate.
"If you're drawing golfers, you can hold that rate."
In other words, golf is a key to the cash register because golfers do not balk at high rates. Nothing wrong with that. It's the strategy behind every could-be, would-be and should-be golf destination everywhere. The question is whether the Riviera Maya-Cancun corridor lives up to the standards those higher rates demand.
So far the answer is as mixed up as Michael Jackson. You can have a great time golfing in Cancun, playing interesting courses during the day, dancing and drinking the night away with the friendly locals. But you can also end up on courses more overpriced for their quality than anything found in even Las Vegas. And you can be freaked by the fact that all the major resorts have huge gates and guards who take down your name and room number when you leave in a taxi in case you don't return.
Every golf trip hinges on the choices you make. But in a Cancun trip the difference in the results from your selections can be as wide as the margin between Jennifer Aniston and Kathy Bates on the Babe Scale. The just-opened P.B. Dye track, the Iberostar Playa Paraiso Golf Club, is a wondrously inventive layout with an eighth hole possessing so many swales and hills that you'll think you're navigating a mountain bike obstacle course. You don't have to know that Dye completely re-bulldozed this hole when he didn't like how it turned out at first to realize that a lot of sweat and anxiety went into getting it just right. And the new Nicklaus Dunes Course at Moon Palace Resort is a striking show of target golf.
Yet
for every hit, there seems to be a whiff as embarrassing as the $200
million 2005 Yankees. Viscontti admits that the golf association has
tried to persuade the owners of the Cancun Golf Club at Pok Ta Pok to
put money into restoring this Robert Trent Jones design that's a shell
of what it could be. Viscontti needs to look at the Hilton Cancun Golf
Resort, the club where he's the director of golf, as well. For a visit
to the Hilton found a course with far too many deep brown patches, puddles
and torn up tee boxes for its $150 price tag.
Admirably, the super courteous staff at the Hilton course admitted they were having some off-season maintenance issues. Unforgiving, they were not offering golfers any discount for these troubles.
Which brings up another truth in Cancun golf: For an area where you can buy a necklace with gemstones for 50 pesos ($5) on a street corner, it's determinedly high-brow in golf pricing.
"It's expensive,'' said Carrol Travis of Colorado, who routinely paid $250 a round on a newlyweds' trip. "But we're on our honeymoon, so we decided to splurge."
Carrol smiled at her husband, Jeff. Then, they hurried to hit their tee shots. The temperature was dancing in the 90s, the humidity made your golf shirt stick like a wetsuit and the bugs were feasting. One monster mosquito landed in a glob of bug repellent, took a bite out of the supposedly-protected arm and flew away merrily.
Yet for all the pests, creature and otherwise, that can muck up Cancun golf, there's an undeniable charm hitting balls here. For one thing, this isn't your father's golf vacation. Even on the courses, the crowd skews much younger than usual. You'll see a steady stream of 25- to 35-year-olds pulling out their drivers.
Guys like Hugo Donoso of Madrid, Spain, who in the middle of a 14-day trip through Mexico could not stop gushing about Playacar Golf Club, a course in the Riviera Maya-Cancun corridor that puts you up close with jungle animals. "It's so beautiful,'' Donoso said. "So beautiful."
The ever-enthusiastic, ever-scheming promoters need
to realize this is what determines a would-be golf
destination's ultimate success or failure: the memories
golf nuts take home. The Cancun Golf Association is
understandably obsessed with boosting the number of
tourists who golf (currently that's only 7 percent of
visitors, with 90 percent of those golfers coming from the
United States). There is also plenty of pride in the fact
that eight more courses are in the works and that the
Riviera Maya-Cancun area should have 20 courses within two
years (a huge number considering there are only 137
courses in all of Mexico).
But all that means little if a golfer goes to the wrong course at the wrong time of year and gets turned off to Cancun golf. A well-publicized visit from the Golf Channel cannot change that. One bad experience is all it takes and this area's much too inconsistent still to prevent that.
You'll find golfers having the time of their life, belting out songs off-key at the karaoke bar at the Iberostar resort. You'll also find golfers lamenting spending $200 on a subpar course, trying to drown their sorrows at bars with hand stamps and teenagers young and annoying enough to be their own kids.
Spring Break is in no danger of losing its stranglehold over Cancun. A birdie paradise does not come so easily.
Any opinions expressed above are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the management. The information in this story was accurate at the time of publication. All contact information, directions and prices should be confirmed directly with the golf course or resort before making reservations and/or travel plans.
