In the city that never sleeps, Las Vegas, you can almost take it to the bank that nothing is ever quite what it appears to be, but Billy Walters nonetheless felt obliged to offer the disclaimer:
"Royal Links Golf Club is not associated nor affiliated with or sponsored by the British Open or any of the golf courses that inspired the Royal Links Golf Club, nor has permission been sought or attained to use their names or hole designs."
Otherwise, feel free to suspend belief.
The Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, which is one of the hosts for Saturday night's heavyweight championship fight between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield, features a 10-acre tropical lagoon, replete with a sandy beach upon which crash mechanically-produced waves. When we first visited the Mandalay Bay a year ago, there were a few bugs in the system. Over-energetic waves kept washing the beach sand back into the bottom of the swimming pool and sent bathers fleeing in terror, but so far as we know the hostelry never posted "tsunami warning" signs.
But to get back to Billy Walters. A roguish punter, he - like many other prominent civic figures around Las Vegas - wears several hats. On one hand he is a golf course owner and developer. The Royal Links is the crown jewel in an empire that also encompasses the three-course Stallion Mountain club on one of whose courses Chip Beck carded a 59 in the Las Vegas Invitational several years ago), as well as the Desert Pines course at Nature Park, which he leases from and operates for the City of Las Vegas.
Walters is also a philanthropist of some note, a major contributor to political causes, and, not entirely coincidentally, a professional gambler. He frequently travels back and forth across the Atlantic, and enjoys a fast friendship with, among others, JP McManus. He is enormously successful at his vocation, so much so that for years the authorities have been attempting to put him out of business. Like Don King, he has spent much of the present decade under indictment. And, like King, he has yet to be convicted.
Although gambling is legal in Nevada, successful gambling tends to attract scrutiny. If a man is suspected of memorising the cards dealt in a blackjack game, he not only risks being expelled from the casino in question, but having his name entered in a "black book" of "known card counters" and being rendered persona non grata at tables throughout the state.
In 1990 Billy Walters was indicted by a federal grand jury as part of a "computer gang," a gambling consortium which employed state-of-the-art tracking records to enhance their chances at Las Vegas casinos. Following a lengthy trial, he was, along with his alleged co-conspirators, acquitted, but not before several influential pillars of the Las Vegas community were given immunity to "flip" and testify against him.
Royal Links was unabashedly created with the high-end Las Visitor in mind. Fixed at nearly £200, the green fees are among the most prohibitive in the area, but where else in the world can a man go out and play the Road Hole at St Andrews, the Postage Stamp at Troon, the sixth at Royal Birkdale, and the eighth at Hoylake - all on the same afternoon?
"I love this form of golf," drawls Walters as he stands in the shadow of Old Tom Morris's statue near the first tee. (Designed by Perry Dye, the Royal Links is dedicated to Old Tom.) "I fell in love with links golf on my many trips to Ireland and Scotland. You've had a number of "tribute" courses spring up around the country over the past decade (most notably the "Tour 18" courses in Texas, which recreate notable holes played on the US PGA Tour), but here in the desert we found we could really perpetuate the look and feel of a traditional links."
Just over a year ago, Walters and three colleagues were accused of running an illegal sports-betting operation from the headquarters of his Sierra Sports, Inc. The firm, which employs a dozen clerks operating some 20 computers and 52 telephone lines, was said to be a front for a multinational operation. According to an indictment, although the funds were largely maintained in a private safe deposit box at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, the transactions were international in scope. Over $1 million in cash was confiscated in a raid coinciding with the indictment.
The fact that Sierra maintained meticulous records, and that Walters assiduously paid income tax on his winnings would suggest, if nothing else, that this was a most unusual criminal enterprise indeed. In fact, when the indictment was handed down, the state attorney general's office was forced to move in to oversee the operation. Stewart Bell, the Las Vegas District Attorney, disqualified his office because his 20-year-old son was an employee of Walters at Desert Pines. Royal Links, notes the course yardage book, "provides a rare opportunity to give something back to the game by allowing players who might never visit Great Britain a chance to experience golf the way it was intended."
Visually, the recreations are amazingly accurate (or at least they are if you can imagine tumbleweed and desert scrub to be heather and gorse), and in summertime the moulded fairways apparently produce a true links effect. As is the case with other Las Vegas courses, climactic conditions require overseeding with zoysia grass in the autumn, which tends to produce more modest bounces in the fairways at this time of year.
"I'd also got to thinking that while there's been an endless succession of new resort courses springing up around Las Vegas over the past several years, there was a need for a traditional-type golf club where a business executive could entertain important clients," explains Walters as he points across the Swilcan Bridge to the magnificent stone castle that is his clubhouse. "This course was really a labour of love, but I saw it fulfilling that need, too. You can bring clients here and it's like bringing them to an old-fashioned gentlemen's club in Britain or Ireland. Go sit in that bar and it's nearly like the real thing."
`Well,' we told him, `it is and it isn't.'
"What do you mean?" asked Billy Walters.
`There are, what, a dozen British Open courses represented here - and not one of them has a clubhouse as fine as yours.'
