O.K. Corales

Tom Fazio is building a second course at the Puntacana Resort & Club in the Dominican Republic. The course, to be called "Corales," will be the sister course to P.B. Dye's highly-regarded La Cana course that plays along the shores of the Caribbean in the Punta Cana region of the DR.

The Corales course, which is scheduled to open next year, will be located on the north shore of the resort in a small enclave of luxury homes.

Fazio's best-known courses include Pinehurst No. 8, Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, the Wade Hampton Club in Cashiers, N.C. and the Links course at Wild Dunes near Charleston, S.C., but he's begun to work more outside the United States in the past few years. The current best examples of his global reach are the spectacular Green Monkey course at Sandy Lane in Barbados and the Querencia course in Los Cabos, Mexico.

Fazio's course at Puntacana will play along the rock cliffs and ocean edges of the Corales coastline and is expected to increase the growing popularity of the 15,000-acre Puntacana resort that over the past several years (the resort opened in 1970) has become one of the more popular destinations in the Caribbean. For example, the Punta Cana International Airport, seven miles from the resort, reported a passenger count last year of more than 1.2 million people compared to the 2,000 that passed through when it first opened in 1984.

The Puntacana Resort, which sits along three miles of beach on the east side of the Dominican Republic, is the brainchild of Dominican businessman Frank Rainieri and Theodore Kheel, a legendary New York labor mediator whose professional resume includes service in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

In addition to the Dye course, the resort features a 420-room hotel, an ecological reserve, a deep water marina, eight restaurants and diving amidst the coral reefs and the sunken ship "Patricia" just offshore. The resort is scheduled to open a Six Senses Spa later this year.

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