By Hal Phillips
The exclusive Ban Rakat Club near Bangkok, Thailand, home to the Gil Hanse-designed Ballyshear Golf Links, has announced two more clubs where members can avail themselves of reciprocal playing privileges: Royal Selangor Golf Club, the oldest and most prestigious club in Malaysia; and Katayamazu Golf Club, the perennial major championship venue located in Japan’s coastal Ishikawa Prefecture.
Royal Selangor GC, founded in 1893, is the oldest golf club in Asia. Some date back farther, in Calcutta (1829) and Hong Kong (1889), but they no long occupy their original locations. The RSGC, as it is known throughout Malaysia, still occupies the same ground – in the heart of downtown Kuala Lumpur – identified by its Scottish founders. Today, the Old Course and New Course offer 36 holes of championship golf. Its clubhouse, recently the subject of a multi-million-Ringgit renovation and upgrade, remains a nexus of the country’s business community and social scene.
Fittingly, the club’s royal designation is not British but rather thoroughly Malaysian. It was conferred in 1963 by His Majesty the Yang DiPertuan Agong, the DYMM Tunku Syed Putra Ibni Al-Marhum Syed Hasan Jamallulail, the Raja of Perlis Indera Kayangan.
Seaside Katayamazu GC is located between the western cites of Kaga and Komatsu, close to the Komatsu International Airport. The club has 90 holes of championship golf at two locations. The club’s three oldest courses – the Hakusan, Nihonkai and Kaga, each designed by Giichi Sato – are the best known, owing to their tournament and aesthetic pedigrees. Each of the three occupy a single property and play strategically through the same coastal forest overlooking the Sea of Japan. Of Katayamazu’s five layouts, the Hakusan maintains the highest profile: Since 2000, it has played host to each of the country’s three most important championships — the Japan Open, Japanese Amateur and Japan Women’s Open.
“Many of our members at Ban Rakat Club do business in Kuala Lumpur and Japan, of course. These reciprocal privileges are meant to serve members of Royal Selangor and Katayamazu Golf Club in the same fashion,” says Takeyasu Aiyama, chairman of Yokohama International Co., Ltd., the company that developed and today manages Ban Rakat Club. “We also recognize that Ballyshear has created great interest across the region. Mr. Hanse is arguably the most sought-after architect in world golf. Ballyshear represents his first-ever commission in Asia. However, what he created here at Ballyshear is completely unique among golf courses in Asia. Golfers want to experience the course, and reciprocal arrangements serve this function while maintaining club integrity.”
Opened in 2021, the Ballyshear Golf Links is indeed unique: From featureless ground, Hanse designed and built an 18-hole homage to The Lido Club, a mythic layout from the hand of early American course architecture pioneers Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor. The original Lido had been expertly carved from similarly featureless ground in 1917, outside New York City; it closed quietly and without ceremony during World War II. In between, however, it was considered the equal of any course on Earth. English golf writer Bernard Darwin considered it every bit the equal of Pine Valley GC, which opened in 1918.
Macdonald and Raynor operated in a specific way: They based the design of each and every golf hole on established “template” holes – the famous Redan at North Berwick in Scotland, the Alps hole down the road at Prestwick, the infamous Biarritz hole in France. The original Lido featured 18 template holes. At Ballyshear, centerpiece of the Ban Rakat Club, Hanse reinterpreted the very same 18 templates, almost entirely in sequence, and adapted them to the Thai landscape.
The stunning low-profile clubhouse at Ban Rakat Club is another example of rarefied design: It is the first-ever clubhouse commission from world-renowned architect Kengo Kuma & Associations, whose signature work is normally large-scale and high-profile: the new Japanese National Stadium in Tokyo, the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo, Bamboo Wall House in China, and the LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) Group’s Japan headquarters. At BRC, Kuma produced a work of remarkable warmth and intimacy.
“We are very pleased and honored that two more prestigious clubs have agreed to reciprocal membership agreements with Ban Rakat Club,” says Aiyama, noting that BRC also maintains a reciprocal relationship with 36-hole Yokohama CC, where the West Course – subject of a 2017 redesign by Coore & Crenshaw – ranks among the top 10 layouts in Japan. “Course quality matters. Yet golf clubs in Asia must also demonstrate the ability to accommodate the game’s diverse social and business components. Our new reciprocal members are excited to experience what has been created here in Bangkok. Our members are equally pleased to experience the unique club, course and business cultures at Royal Selangor and Katayamazu.”
Just six years ago, many Ban Rakat Club members were, in fact, members of Kiarti Thanee CC, a membership club that occupied the same property. For 25 years, Kiarti Thanee had proved a successful members club with an ordinary 25-year-old golf course whose chief attribute was location – just 35 minutes from centre city and 20 minutes from Suvarnhabumi International Airport. The club could have merely renovated the golf course. Instead, they hired Yokohama International to radically redevelop the entire property.
“Hiring Gil Hanse was Step 1,” Aiyama says. “Building the golf course and clubhouse represent Steps 2 and 3. Now we look forward to sharing what we’ve created with like-minded fans of classic golf design, across Asia.”
Photo: The 13th hole (“Knoll”) at Ballyshear Golf Links, with the “Short” 14th beyond (Mandarin Media)
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