Dust To Dust

The Golf Blogging cognoscenti are abuzz with the news that Tiger’s Al Ruwaya design has been abandoned by its Dubai backers, and that the whole thing will be returned to the desert. If you follow the party line, its another sign of Tiger’s reversal of fortune.

But this one, at least, has nothing to do with Tiger. Instead, it has everything to do with the global recession and real estate metldown. Al Ruwaya, with its planned 100 villas, 75 mansions, 22 palaces, hotel, golf academy and 139,000 square foot clubhouse is not the only project that ambitions and oil rich nation has abandoned. More than two hundred real estate deals were cancelled last year. A planned one kilometer tall skyscraper lies half completed. Real estate prices, already 60% off peak, are expected to fall another ten percent in the next two years. Workers, engineers and architects are fleeing country so fast that at one point, more than 3,000 abandoned automobiles littered the Dubai airport.

Tiger may have at one point had magic powers on the golf course, but he doesn’t have that kind of apocalyptic voodoo.