Up close, Rory McIlroy teeing off at the Earth Course at Jumeirah Golf Estates, the host of this week’s DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, looks no different than it would anywhere else in the world.
His swing is balanced, fluid and powerful, and his ball flies far and straight, landing on a lush green fairway. There’s water around, some rocks and sand. The skyscrapers surrounding the course present a nice contrast to an always blue sky. But overall, the course looks like another pristine tournament venue for elite professional golfers.
Yet what happened to get the Earth Course ready to host the best players on the DP World Tour, let alone to create it out of the desert when Greg Norman built it in 2009, is vastly different to how other top venues on the DP World Tour are prepared.
Dubai receives only about four inches of rain a year. Summer temperatures can surpass 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius). The sun is so extreme that working outdoors from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the peak summer months in the United Arab Emirates is strictly prohibited.
So how does an area so inhospitable to being outdoors, let alone playing golf, have such a premier facility that serves as the venue for the culmination of the tour’s season?
The answer is very carefully and very deliberately.
