In the coming weeks, crews will start working on the grandstands and hospitality structures for the upcoming Black Desert Championship. Patrick Manning, with Black Desert Resort talks about the construction, parking, yardage, PGA Tour guidance and EVEN ‘who’ will hand off the championship trophy!
we’re uh a little too close to uh to Showtime but uh we’ll be fine we’ll be good we’ve got a great tournament team that has a lot of tournament experience under their belts and uh the PGA comes out about once every few weeks and checks on uh on things and they feel really good and so I feel good I feel good about the what how much we’ll have ready for of the resort uh when the tournament gets here and I feel really good about the quality of the tournament we’re going to put on and all the excitement that we’re hearing around the tournament so what else needs to be done between now and then I mean but not July 1 but what else needs to be done that that is on that bucket list of goal items to complete before you get dropes of people coming to the course well we’ve got we’re building um we’re building about 5,000 parking spaces um we’re building roads and curbing Gutter and we’re putting in uh all the anchoring for the four-story and the three story structures as well as the the single level structure um it’s just a ton I don’t we we’d be here for an hour me telling you all the stuff we got to have done between now and then that isn’t done yet typically before a tournament courses will reduce play and such have you had that conversation what does that look like for how much time you’re allowing in between public play to stop and the tournament to take place yeah public play stops on September 17th and the tournament starts essentially October 10th um so we’ll be down we’ll be down for you know not a month but a few weeks have you had any indication into some of the folks that might be a part of the field on this tournament schedule this far out yeah this is really it’s it’s really early for them in their schedule um but because it’s a new tournament um calling inquiring um and there are you know a good handful of top names um I don’t think I want a name drop on that it was awesome having Patrick Fishburn a few days on national television with Black Desert you know we sponsored him and uh and he told me he called me and he said just the the players were just asking him a million questions about Black Desert so because he’ been the only one that had played it so obviously Patrick’s a big one and you got the exemption for another local you know a golf star basically which is really cool and then you name out Tom Weiss coff week which is awesome with the city so you’ve done a lot of really cool things tied to the local but are there the potential for other local large names to be playing in this tournament Allah somebody who played quite well at the PGA Championship this weekend right uh let’s just say there are yes we’re we’re pretty optimistic on on that um we also did we had two non-qualifier exemptions and Jon Blake who you were just mentioning um and then weiry uh will play in the tournament as well um so we’re excited to have Mike Weir down in terms of major tournament Preps are there certain buildings and such that you can live without or if they’re not done in time or things like that like where is that sort of process at is you talked about the parking space you talked about a couple other things but in terms of infrastructure on the property are there things you say oh if we have that done great but if not we can live with it at this point yeah that’s really only we know we have to have the convention center for all the media broadcast all that just just all the stuff that’s going to go into um uh you know the tournament and uh we we have to provide daycare we have to provide a place for for education for the kids and that can all be housed on on Black Desert year one um the only thing I’m a little disappointed in is I was shooting for uh 700 rooms to be open by PJ tour and it looks like we’re going to hit about 450 but all of the other things will be done that we were expecting to get done you mentioned the PGA Tour crew is there every so often kind of just checking in on things what is the latest I guess progress report from them about how they’re feeling about picking this thing off uh I think they’re really excited um they their rules official was out um I think it was last week um and just kind of looking at the progress we’ve made on the golf course we made about they they requested one change and then they suggested 10 and and uh we did nine of the 10 changes um the one was just a bad idea so uh but yeah we are actually done with the changes to the course uh now on July um July 1st I believe we start uh building the structures uh for the VIP hospitality and the and also the the general admission how long’s the course going to play for the tournament about 7,400 yards what’s the message to folks here that either live in that Community or are just in St George and really don’t know what to expect in terms of the load of people coming here for this event well there will be a load of people that’s for sure U we’re expecting about 40,000 people to the PJ event um however it’s a lot different than what they’re used to with the marathons with Iron Man with Huntsman World Senior Games there’s road closures especially with Iron Man road closures everywhere we will have none we won’t even close a lane um and so BEC that’s why we’re building you know the thousands and thousands of parking spaces on site is that we don’t we don’t have to be uh doing a lot of offsite parking we have arrange with tu Aon uh to have some overflow parking to there if needed uh but then we’ll just shuttle them you know we’ll shuttle them back and forth so we’re we’re we’re really depending on shuttles versus versus vehicles and I think there’s even a possibility we will be able to H handle every single fan um on site at Black Desert anything else about kind of things where they stand today getting ready for you know what what the ultimate goal is here and that’s to kick off just a a great history a reignited history PGA Tour golf here in Utah well I think it’s fun um I didn’t really have any interest in handing off the trophy to the winner of the PJ tournament um so I invited Governor Cox to hand off the trophy and he accepted so I think he’s trying to clear his schedule and be down here for the whole tournament week so that’ll be fun
