In the early 1960s, Joseph R. McMicking, a American businessman born in the Philippines, arrived in southern Spain with the dream of replicating Makati, a Filipinian golf resort following the Californian style, on the shores of the Mediterranean.
"I can understand why he did it. This area is very beautiful and reminds me of California. It's a fantastic golf course," said American Wyndham Clark, winner of the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club and competing this week in the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucia Masters, at the Real Club de Golf in Sotogrande.
"It was a 'Welcome Mr. McMicking,'" said the 83-year-old McMicking's former right-hand man, Jaime Brujó, referring to the title of a Spanish comedy about the frustrated hopes that the Marshall Plan of American aid to Europe after World War II would not elude Spain.
Unlike Marshall, McMicking came to Sotogrande to stay. "He was a member of Cypress Point and wanted to do something similar and big," Brujó recalls of the initial project and the impact on the region.
The American businessman convinced architect Robert Trent Jones to design his first course in Europe and hired about a thousand people from the area to build access roads, hotels, homes and a golf course, in a place "quite removed from civilization," in Brujó's words.
In a 1965 interview, Robert Trent Jones told a Golf Monthly reporter that Sotogrande was certainly one of the most spectacular sites in the world for the construction of a golf course, and the only one with views of two continents. The golf club with 24 members inaugurated a few months earlier changed the life and reality of the Guadiaro River Valley forever.
"A large part of my family and many acquaintances have worked here. Most of the people in the area worked in agriculture and switched to construction, gardening, and golf course maintenance," says the manager of the pro shop, Diego Romero, born in 1964 and with 43 years of employment at the Real Club de Golf de Sotogrande.
In the words of his colleague, José Manuel Barbera, who was also born the same year as the inauguration of the course and has been working at the club for 35 years: "This golf thing moves mountains. For this area, golf has been the biggest economic injection ever. Directly or indirectly, everyone in this region has someone working in the golf industry."
The Real Club de Golf de Sotogrande, which has hosted international stars such as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and golf legends such as Argentina's Roberto de Vicenzo, winner of the 1966 Spanish Open, and Severiano Ballesteros, PGA of Spain Champion in 1987, planted the seed for the development of dozens of courses and thousands of jobs in the golf industry in southern Spain.
"My grandfather, my uncle, my father, my cousins, my brother... We have all lived and live from golf. Most people here have a job connected with golf," said Raul Quiros, caddie of Pablo Larrazábal.
All three generations of Quiros were introduced to the world of golf as teenagers at the Real Club de Golf de Sotogrande caddie school, where a schoolteacher taught the youngsters when they were not working on the course.
And several Quiros’ and other boys from the area got to compete professionally thanks to another project by Joseph R. McMicking and Robert Trent Jones, the La Cañada Golf Club, a municipal course with a thriving junior school.
"When you drive through Guadiaro, the most normal thing is to see kids carrying golf bag going up to La Cañada. In the TV at the village bar, as soon as the soccer is over, golf is on," adds Raul Quiros, who teaches golf at La Cañada when he is not traveling around the world.
Six decades later, the Guadiaro Valley and the Real Club de Golf de Sotogrande, now home to the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucia Masters, with 2,400 members and almost a hundred employees, are still enjoying McMicking's American dream.
To enjoy the event you only need to purchase tickets for the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucía Masters, with special prices for federated golfers and free for children under 13, on the event website.
The Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucía Masters, an event in the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai made possible by the essential contribution of the Real Club de Golf Sotogrande, is sponsored by Estrella Damm and the Consejería de Turismo, Cultura y Deporte de la Junta de Andalucía, jointly funded by the EU and was declared Event of Exceptional Public Interest by the Government of Spain.
