The Man from Omega

You are no stranger to golf in China. How do you see it developing?

It's a tough market, China. We've been in there over 20 years with the Asian Tour and we've had the Omega China Tour before [from 2005- 2009]. For many years we were involved with the CGA [China Golf Association], but it doesn't really get the importance in China that it deserves. It's part of their "small ball" association [The Multi-Ball Games Administrative Center). I don't feel there is a commitment from "high up". Big golf, there's no commitment.

If you look at golf in countries in Asia like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, golf is big, so in China it should be enormous. We felt this 10 years ago, golf could be big, so that's why we invested a lot of money in the Omega Mission Hills World Cup in China at Mission Hills and Hainan - a lot of money. But the lack of success was not the fault of the Chinese. The fault is that the countries and federations did not send the right teams. I told them, I was fighting with them all the time. You can't have a World Cup and just send two guys who get on well together and go there for fun. Very few countries really sent their best teams. It was a disgrace, so we pulled out. We had a contract for 12 years, six plus six. We took it to court, we won, we're not going to stay and we pulled out [after five years]. Now they, Mission Hills, want to pull out. It went to Melbourne last year …

Now I think, what's going to happen is that the Olympics will replace the World Cup. See, that's what the World Cup should have done, had a qualification system like the Olympics based on World Rankings without all this, you know … Tiger Woods doesn't like to play with Phil Mickleson, so ... come on! It's true, it's ridiculous!

Some countries didn't send their best, but in hindsight some great pairings did show up.

True, we had the Molinari brothers come onto the world stage, [Henrik] Stenson and [Robert] Karlsson won. We had Rory and GMac playing. Pairs would be a good format for the Olympics. We are involved and hopefully can make it a great success. The course being finished is key.

Let’s talk about the Olympics. Rio 2016 sees golf returning to the Olympics where Omega's relationship is staggering. I understand that you’ve been involved since 1932?

That’s right! We need to negotiate, though. I want to get the next one up to 2032. To say "100 Years", that would be nice!

We interviewed Ty Votaw when he was driving golf back into the Olympics. Were you involved in that process?

I'll be very honest with you. Yes, at our level, yes but we didn't really have a say in this in terms of format, OK. They knew from the outset that Omega was fully behind it and we talked about how we can really make it special, get some ideas for working at the Olympics, scoring and visual, and so on. You know it's going to a whole different ball game for Omega, you know the Olympics. So I think we can make it a little bit more interesting and work on that.