Water is in play on half the holes at Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Korea.
Courtesy Jack Nicklaus GC Korea
In a golf-crazed world, few places are crazier about the game than South Korea.
This can be measured by simple economics. With a population of 51 million, South Korea boasts the third largest golf market in the world, behind the United States and Japan. But another metric that shows is course construction. In the past 20 years, the number of green grass plots in South Korea has almost doubled, from about 250 to 500.
Of those courses, few have a higher profile than the one in the spotlight this week: Jack Nicklaus Golf Club Koreawhere the Genesis Championship is taking place.
As the final regular-season event on the DP World Tour – and the final cutoff to determine the 70 players who will make it to the Race to Dubai – the tournament has attracted a number of the circuit’s biggest names, including South Korean superstars Ben An and Tom Kim.
In Thursday’s opening round, An shot a five-under 67. On Friday, he did one better. At 11 under for the tournament, he has a two-shot lead over South Africa’s Casey Jarvis and Italy’s Francesco Laporta. That’s a lot of red numbers. But conditions have been mild. And these results contradict the said challenge. In a country where course difficulty is a point of pride, the Jack Nicklaus GC is among the toughest tests.
Stretching more than 7,400 yards from the tees, the Jack Nicklaus Signature Design is protected by more than length. Fairways and greens are jealously guarded by bunkers, and water is in play on more than half the holes.
This is not the first time this course has challenged the best in the world. Built over three years, between 2007 and 2010, the layout was conceived with championship golf in mind. Even before it was officially opened to its members, it hosted one PGA Tour Champions event. Five years later, it hosted the 2015 Presidents Cup, the first time the biennial event was held in Asia.
Courtesy Jack Nicklaus GC Korea
Along with its design, the property’s infrastructure makes it a tour-worthy place. It is one of the few private clubs in land-strapped South Korea with a world-class practice range. It also enjoys a prime location, approximately 45 minutes from downtown Seoul, within striking distance of Incheon International Airport, in Songdo, an environmentally conscious “smart city” of nearly 200,000 residents.
Like much of Incheon itself, the construction of the course was a feat of engineering, on wetlands that had been reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. When Nicklaus Design president Paul Stringer first visited the site in 2004, he recalls, “over half the property was under water.”
“What we created at Songdo over the next two years with fill from the Yellow Sea was truly amazing,” says Stringer.
Check it yourself. The second round replay of the Genesis Championship is on Golf Channel from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET on Friday. This weekend’s coverage will be available live on the NBC Sports app and on tape delay on the Golf Channel.
