When Tour pros design courses, how much work do they actually do?

It’s not uncommon for top Tour pros to carve out second careers as golf course architects, stamping their names on high-profile projects. But how involved are they, really, in those designs?

That seemed like a good question for the architect Brian Curley.

Born and raised in Pebble Beach, Calif., where Pebble Beach Golf Links counted as a home course, Curley got his start in golf design under Pete Dye in the 1980s before co-founding his own firm.

In his decades-long career, he has amassed scores of acclaimed design credits around the world, including the Wilderness Club in Montana and Plantation Golf Club in Palm Springs.

But nowhere has he been more prolific than in Asia. Among Curley’s notable projects on that continent is Mission Hills, in Shenzen, China, which is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest golf development in the world.

A sprawling complex that could pass for a small city, Mission Hills is home to 12 courses whose names (the Vijay Course, the Faldo Course, the Els Course, the Annika Course and so on) ring out like roll call at the World Golf Hall of Fame. In the public record, those are the players who designed the courses. In actual fact, though, it was Curley who did the heavy lifting.

How much did his famous design partners contribute?

The short answer is, “it varied.” The longer answer is provided in this week’s episode of the Destination Golf podcast, in which Curley appeared as a guest (spoiler alert: Curley managed to complete the Ozaki Course at Mission Hills without ever meeting the Japanese star Jumbo Ozaki).

The concept of a player-architect, Curley says, often presents a paradox. For marketing purposes, it helps to have “a fairly prominent active player who is making news and winning tournaments.” But that kind of success requires such focus that it leaves little time for other pursuits. It’s a tricky balance to pull off both.

Beyond Mission Hills, Curley experienced that phenomenon first-hand while collaborating with his friend Fred Couples in the 1990s, when Couples was still in his competitive prime.

“Fred was No. 1 in the world at the time,” Curley says. “So he wasn’t really doing a lot of site visits.”

Not that Curley begrudges such partnerships. On the right projects, he’s content to play a Cyrano De Bergerac-like role, a behind-the-scenes creative force, even as he pushes forward with designs where his own name is on the marquee.

To hear more from Curley on his globe-trotting career, past and present, as well as his off-course collaborations as the front man for a popular Scottsdale-area cover band, you can listen to the entire episode here.

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