Jones Lang LaSalle

Fore! ... hundred thousand dollars
Builders gamble on expensive, exclusive Jersey City club
Sunday, April 02, 2006
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff

So what do you with a contaminated tank farm in Jersey City?

Bury a dead mobster, perhaps.

Or build the world's most exclusive golf course.

Beginning July Fourth, that course will be found at Liberty National. Here, on a reclaimed ex panse of toxic ground, the ripples from New York Harbor already lap against the wetlands 30 feet below the 14th hole -- a 149-yard par three in the spirit of Pebble Beach on California's Monterey Peninsula. A few hundred yards into the bay, Lady Liberty takes in the action from an elevated, island gallery.

Beyond the statue, the glass- and-stone skyline of Lower Manhattan looms. There, if the owners of this club have it right, people will be willing to fork over a $400,000 initiation fee to play on one of the most expensive golf courses ever built. Rudy Giuliani has already signed on as a charter member. So has New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

Please, no applications, though.

Membership is by invite only, and for only 50 people this year. Also, don't expect to get on this course via the company tab. There will be no corporate memberships, either.

"You just can't have a guy who paid that kind of initiation fee waiting for one of his employees to tee off," said Dan Fireman, son of Ree bok International founder Paul Fireman, and the chief executive of Liberty National builder Willow bend Development.

The Firemans have bet $130 million they can re-create the atmosphere at the famed Augusta National Golf Club -- home of this week's Masters Tournament -- with one big perk: New York's cap tains of finance and industry will now have 15-minute boat ride to this playpen, rather than a two- hour plane ride to Georgia.

"This is a high-stakes gamble in getting existing exclusive private club members to add another club to their bag, or to find young money that's looking for panache," said Jim Koppenhaver, president of Pellucid, a leading consultant to the golf industry.

"It will either succeed famously or fail tragically, and much of it will rest on whether they can create 'must have' emotion."


PLENTY OF GREEN

So far, the Firemans have spent plenty of money to find out. And they aren't the only ones.

Donald Trump opened a course in Bedminster two years ago with a $250,000 entry fee. Sebonack Golf Club on Long Island's East End will come on line this summer with an entry fee of more than $600,000. Memorial Day brings the opening of the Bayonne Golf Club, 1.5 miles south of Liberty National, with its $150,000 initiation charge for a striking course modeled on Royal Troon in Scotland.

The boom comes as a growing community of freshly minted wealth has become frustrated with the years-long wait lists to get into the old-line established clubs, developers and industry experts said. At the same time, the only way to make money on a golf course in a metropolitan area, these days, is to charge sky-high fees.

"It's just very, very expensive to build courses like these," said Eric Bergstol, chief executive of Empire Golf, which spent $100 million on the rolling, links-style Bayonne course.

"You could never make any money on something like this with a daily fee. So you build a course that attracts a quality of people who are impressed with what you've done, and they encourage their friends to join. It's the way clubs have developed for 100 years."


BEHIND THE SCENES

Still, the sudden confluence of new clubs for the wealthiest of the wealthy is enough to make any weekend hacker froth with envy.

"It's an abundance of courses that are all going to be spectacular, with settings on the water," said Jay Mottola, executive director of the Metropolitan Golf Association, which represents the region's 250 clubs and golf courses. "But even in an expensive area, Sebonack and Liberty National are twice as high as almost any other place."

So what do you get at Liberty National for writing a $400,000 check?

For starters, 160 acres of tight, parkland-style golf more commonly found in the English countryside than the formerly contaminated swamps of Jersey. The course meanders around six finger-like ponds and through hills as high as 40 feet that were carved from 3 million cubic yards of fill. The landscape is as strange to see in this setting as a grassy track in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Then there are the views. On Liberty National's par-three second hole, golfers will aim at Lady Liberty's right shoulder. They will shoot directly at the Manhattan skyline on the par-four fourth hole. On holes eight through 13, the Verra zano-Narrows bridge dominates the southeastern horizon. The 18h hole runs along a cove of wetlands and shoreline where gulls peck for food in the mudflats.

And don't expect some oak- paneled, faux-Tudor clubhouse. Instead the Firemans modeled the building on the Sydney opera house, complete with a premiere dining room and five-star service.

They have hired Aurelian Ang helusiu, who honed his skills at a Four Seasons Hotel in Switzerland, to manage the operation. He plans for caddies to act as on-course concierges who know the members' favorite drinks and foods. Weekend mornings will feature mimosas on the driving range. On colder mornings, there will be hot cider and a masseuse.

"These are going to be the titans of Wall Street and they have tight schedules, so we want to be as attentive as we can be," said Adrian Davies, a former European tour pro who is the club's director of golf development.


'OVER THE TOP'

Dan Fireman said the once-in-a- lifetime chance to build a course next to the Statue of Liberty called for the ultimate roll of the dice.

"We chose to go over the top because we want this course to be on television, to be thought of as 'America's golf course,'" he said.

But with just 50 members this year, Liberty National figures to be one of the emptiest tracks in the country. Even Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield has nearly 500 members. Public courses send off 50 golfers in the course of three hours.

For the Firemans, who sold Reebok last year for $3.8 billion to Adidas-Solomon and pocketed $800 million on the deal, Liberty National is part of 15-year venture into golf course development that began after they got blackballed at an old-line club near their Cape Cod home -- they believe because they are Jewish.

That experience led them to build Willowbend Country Club in Mashpee in 1991. At the time, even the courses at the country's top clubs were attached to old clubhouses where accommodations were tight and musty. And few members enjoyed being forced to spend several thousand dollars each year in the dining room on thick, overdone streaks and dry po tatoes.

At Willowbend, the Firemans put in a modern clubhouse that evoked old New England with covered porches and stone terraces, but also came with a spa and fit ness center, a chef from Le Cirque, hotel-style rooms and the service of a five-star inn. Now the Firemans own nine resort-style golf clubs valued at $2 billion, including the Westin Rio Mar in Puerto Rico and the Ranch in the Berkshires.


THE CONDOS

At Liberty National, they are taking the effort a step further.

Here, the Firemans have built a 7,400-yard course they say will be capable of hosting a PGA tournament, perhaps even a major championship like the PGA Championship or U.S Open that traditionally goes to places like Baltusrol. It has been designed with ample room between the holes to allow for 30,000 people to move around the grounds and the kinds of vistas sports television producers dream about.

Planning that began eight years ago. After three years of environmental reviews, 80,000 truckloads of soil and, in some places, a half- inch plastic seal to cover the contaminated ground, they are nearly ready to open .

But not even the Firemans be lieve they can make money just off the golf. Profits, if there are any, will come from that other Jersey obsession: real estate.

In addition, the plan includes the real money-maker for any golf course with an unheard of $130 million price tag -- three planned luxury towers, 33, 34 and 50 stories high that will cost roughly $800 million, making the overall project one of the biggest in New Jersey right now. Only Xanadu at the Meadowlands is bigger.

"Golf course developments receive financing, even when the golf course operation itself is not ex pected to be profitable," said Frank Limehous, a professor at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business and an expert in the economics of the golf industry.

The residential towers, on the other hand, are expected to be profitable, especially as the market for high-end condominiums on New Jersey's so-called Gold Coast remains hot, with apartments in the adjacent Port Liberte development selling these days for more than $600 per square foot.

"If they market these buildings the right way, they will work," said Erik Kaiser, who has built successful luxury developments in both Jersey City and Hoboken. "If these are apartments for young professionals and their families, this can absolutely be a success."

The real question concerning Davies and Fireman these days is how the course's tight fairways, small greens and wind-swept landscape will measure up against the world's top duffers. That ultimately, is what will make the difference between Liberty National being yet another expensive club or one of the country's top courses capable of hosting a national championship.

The answer won't come for several years.

"You never know how good a facility is until you play it," said Mot tola, who has walked the course. "It has to be put to the test of golfers."



Matthew Futterman covers the sports business. He can be reached at (973) 392-1732, or mfutterman@star ledger.com.