Norman’s first Middle East design, the Earth Course is part of the prestigious Jumeirah Golf Estates, a huge residential golf complex in Dubai. Each year, the course hosts the season-ending DP World Tour Championship, the climax of the European Tour’s Race to Dubai. Norman called the last four holes, played alongside or over water culminating in a meandering creek running the full length of the final hole, “the most challenging mile in golf”. It’s a parkland-style course with rolling fairways and brilliant white bunkering, framed by a plethora of trees and shrubs, making the course a feast for the eyes.
El Camaleon Golf Club at the Mayakoba resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, became the home of the OHL Classic at Mayakoba in 2007, the first PGA Tour event to be contested outside the US and Canada. Part of a community of luxury hotels, the course winds through three diverse ecosystems: the tropical Mayan jungle, mangrove wetlands and the Mexican Caribbean shoreline. Holes are bisected by massive limestone canals and Norman even incorporated a cenote, an ancient cavern common to the area, into the heart of the opening fairway. It has all the hallmarks of a Norman design: manicured and good to look at, very testing, but designed with amateurs in mind with five tee boxes.