Joel,
Seriously? Do you think mountains, deserts and low country are great pieces of property to build GREAT courses? How do his ocean properties compare to Pacific Dunes and Barnbougle? Fazio has no great great courses in my mind. I don't know of a course that he built that was on land that could have yielded one, but perhaps I am wrong.
Sean,
I guess if the only way you can build a great course is to have oceanfront property or land in the sand hills, then no, Tom Fazio hasn't had any land like that.* He's not likely to get hired to build a course in the sand hills -- the numbers don't work for that -- but I don't know why he's never been hired to work on oceanfront property. Or, maybe I do -- Chileno Bay in Cabo has some oceanfront property, but they put the houses there and not the golf, I think. That's the priority for lots of his clients.
I was trying to get a job years ago [that never happened] on world-class land, where Tom Fazio was the client's first choice. The only reason they talked to me about it was that the client was becoming frustrated with Fazio for never talking about what a good piece of ground it was ... all he talked about was that if they were totally committed to quality [i.e., had enough money], that he would build them something great. Money was not an issue for this client, but it still disturbed him that the architect didn't seem to be enthused about the ground. Maybe that is what has prevented him from getting more such sites.
* I have to admit that it sometimes bothers me that my courses near the ocean are always rated above the ones that aren't. It seems a bit too simplistic. I've done some of my best work near the ocean, but it's not like we have a special playbook we only pull out for those occasions. And it also discounts the enormous amount of hard work that so many people put in to make a course Great. But, I've been the beneficiary of that bias, and I really like working next to the ocean, so I'm probably the last person who should be complaining about it.