“Bidders tee up for Fortune golf unit: sources” plus 1 more |
| Bidders tee up for Fortune golf unit: sources Posted: 11 Mar 2011 12:49 PM PST PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Initial takeover offers for Fortune Brands' golf unit are expected to be submitted today by a range of bidders, including Adidas AG, Nike Inc and private equity firms, sources familiar with the situation said on Friday. Fortune Brands said in December it would split off its golf and home products units under pressure from activist investor William Ackman. The golf unit is the first to receive bids, said the sources, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The unit, which makes Titleist golf balls and clubs, as well as FootJoy shoes and gloves, had revenue of $1.22 billion and operating income of about $25 million in 2010. The golf unit had about $100 million in cash flow last year, which could give it a valuation of about $800 million to $1 billion, sources said. Other bidders may include Roger Cleveland Golf Co, owned by SRI Sports, as well as some private equity firms, one source said. More than two dozen potential bidders have looked at the business, but it was unclear how many would make first-round offers, the source said. Fortune, Adidas, Nike and Roger Cleveland could not be immediately reached for comment. (Reporting by Jessica Hall; Editing by Steve Orlofsky) This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Posted: 10 Mar 2011 01:09 PM PST If you want a course that was built in the 1920s and endures into the 21st century, the Biltmore is for you The Doral Golf Resort & Spa in Miami is the focus of the golf world's attention this week, because the WGC-Cadillac Championship is being played there. But Doral is hardly the only top-notch resort in the area. Golfers interested in classic golf design should consider a visit to the Biltmore course in nearby Coral Gables. Donald Ross designed the course that is adjacent to the elegant Biltmore Hotel, itself a National Historic Landmark. Ross, who was born in Dornoch, Scotland, designed the course to offer the full pleasures and challenges of the game. He meant the course should allow a player to choose from a variety of shots. It was strategic golf, and it was appealing golf. Over the years, though, things changed. The Biltmore became a municipal course and attention wasn't paid to its conditioning. It deteriorated, and anybody who saw it in its heyday must have been saddened. Here, after all, was a course where Bobby Jones and Babe Ruth had played. Tiger Woods won the Orange Bowl Junior International there when he was 15 years old in 1991, but the course was already far from its prime then. Many bunkers eventually became little more than holes in the ground. Ross's principles became compromised, as greens also changed due to maintenance practices. So it was that a decision was made to hire the Ross expert Brian Silva to come up with what he called a "sympathetic restoration" of the course, that originally opened in 1926 and reopened four years ago. The restoration cost $5,000,000, and the course awakened again. It awakened because Silva, who is based in Dover, N.H., had studied Ross for years, and delved into traditional architecture. Here's something Silva believes in, and it comes directly from Ross. Ross wrote the following: "The golf holes on the best links have sufficient different ways of playing them and because they do not present just one and only one way to everybody, the interest in the game increases with the diversity of its problems." Silva's work follows this philosophy. He completely redid the tees, bunkers and greens. He flashed the sand up against the bunker faces, and let the turf roll down over the edges of the bunkers. Greens were expanded, and many were pushed up. Silva invites the run-up shot into many greens, using flanking bunkers. At the same time the greens, even those raised only slightly, aren't easily hit. Precision is required, because the greens fall off into swales. The ball runs away. It's the tried and true and intriguing "miss the target by a little and you miss it by a lot." Perfectly Dornochian, one might say, given that Ross absorbed his design principles by walking the ground at the Royal Dornoch course far to the north in the Scottish Highlands. I enjoyed the course thoroughly when I played it. The course offers views of the glamorous Biltmore Hotel, with its cupola inspired by the Giralda tower above the Cathedral of Seville in Seville, Spain. The cupola stands sentinel over the course, and provides quite the backdrop. There's also a state of the art Total Performance Golf center on the property. Justin Bruton, the director of golf and a sharp observer of the golf swing and what it takes to make it work, runs the TPG facility. "A lot of instructors still don't understand the body/swing connection, even with all the information that is readily available now," Bruton told me this week. "We recently started a junior development program which is 60% athletic development and 40% golf skills training. It has really exploded with over 60 kids a week going through the program." Meanwhile, I'd like to add a suggestion for anybody contemplating a visit to the Biltmore. Aficionados of a disappearing enterprise in our culture - the independent bookshop - should consider a visit to Books & Books, in Coral Gables. Trust me, Books & Books is a must-visit. Keep an eye on the author events. Browse the various rooms. Have lunch, and pick up a book to bring back to the Biltmore. Take it with you for an evening drink in the wood-paneled Biltmore Bar. I did that, and I had a hard time leaving. If you want to feel you've gone back in time, and a course that was built in the 1920s and endures under Silva's guidance into the 21st century, the Biltmore is for you. ALSO FROM LORNE RUBENSTEIN: Woods a human being, not a golf machine The hardest working man in golf Frank Chirkinian, a good and generous man --- Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca. You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Golf - Yahoo! News Search Results To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment