Agustín Pizá doesn’t watch the news. To preserve his peace of mind, the golf course architect largely ignores the ceaseless churn of headlines, keeping up instead by stealing glances at select social feeds. Sports are the exception.
“I follow them because they focus on success stories,” Pizá told GOLF.com by phone.
On rare occasions, though, events intrude. This past Sunday morning was one of them.
Pizá was in Puerto Vallarta, where he keeps an office and apartment, wrapping up a work trip that included site visits to two ongoing projects. With a noon flight scheduled, he wasn’t in a rush. Easing out of bed, he pulled back the curtains. No more than 600 feet away, columns of black smoke darkened the sky above the city.
“At first I thought it was an accident,” he said. “But it almost looked like a war zone.”
His news blackout was about to end. Pizá scanned his phone, which buzzed with worried messages from family and friends, then fumbled with the TV remote.
“I do that so infrequently, it took me a while to find the channel,” he said.
The story was coming into focus. A military operation had killed the country’s most-wanted drug lord, triggering cartel retaliation. Buses and businesses were torched. Clashes erupted between security forces and suspected gang members. Dozens were reported dead. The city was placed in lockdown. Pizá’s flight was canceled.
That was inconvenient. It was also the least of his concerns.
“This is really a one-off incident for Puerto Vallarta,” he said. “Anyone who has been here knows it’s one of the coolest, safest, friendliest places you can go. But it’s unfortunate because in the end Mexico lives off tourism.”
For Puerto Vallarta, the stakes are particularly high. The metropolitan area is home to roughly 500,000 people and has been a major international destination since the 1960s. Tourism is the region’s economic engine, and golf is one of the pistons.
The stretch of coastline along Banderas Bay, running north toward Punta Mita, is a mosaic of jungle, mountain and ocean, a varied landscape that Pizá regards as a uniquely compelling canvas for golf. The region’s portfolio ranges from the moody mountain corridors of Vista Vallarta Club de Golf to the coastal resort that hosts the PGA Tour’s VidantaWorld Mexico Open, just across the river in Nayarit.
For Pizá, the connection is personal as well as professional. Born and raised in Tijuana and now based in San Diego with his wife and three children, he has straddled the border in both life and work. He opened his Puerto Vallarta office in 2006 in conjunction with a commission as project manager on the Bahía Course, a Jack Nicklaus Signature design in Punta Mita. The office now employs eight people and serves as a hub for projects across Mexico, Latin America and Europe. Pizá’s San Diego office handles stateside projects.
In industry circles, Pizá is regarded as a creative thinker inclined toward unconventional concepts. Among his more out-of-the-box projects is the Butterfly Effect, a 24-hole layout-in-the-making in the Coahuila Desert divided into four six-hole loops that can played independently. Among everyday golf fans, he gained wider notice with the launch of TGL, the tech-driven league founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.
In that virtual arena, his holes have stood out for their whimsy. One is modeled on a cenote, a water-filled limestone cavern; its fairway is a tapered, concave platform. Another, called “Temple,” looks like what you might get if Alister MacKenzie had collaborated with the Aztecs. If you have watched the likes of Justin Thomas or Rickie Fowler trying to plot their way around those fantastical settings, you have seen Pizá’s imagination at work.
On Monday, with parts of the city still shuttered and his Puerto Vallarta office closed, TGL offered a welcome outlet. Pizá stayed inside and tuned in as the simulator league aired on television, watching players take on challenges he’d helped conceive.
“If it wasn’t for TGL,” he said, “I’m not sure what I’d be doing.”
By Tuesday, authorities had lifted restrictions, the airport had reopened and his flight was rebooked. The smoke had cleared. In Puerto Vallarta, at least, the immediate crisis appeared contained.
Pizá is careful not to dismiss what happened. He recognizes how jarring it must look from afar, and he knows there will be short-term consequences for locals whose livelihoods depend on visitation.
“I’m thinking about restaurateurs, hotel workers, caddies,” he said. “I’m sure they’re going to feel it.”
At the same time, Pizá pushes back against broad-brush conclusions. When such clashes erupt, he said, tourists are not typically the intended targets. The violence tends to be a show of force between authorities and criminal groups before it recedes. Still, images travel, violent images especially. Context, by contrast, travels slowly.
Pizá tries to provide that to anyone who’ll listen. When friends ask if Mexico is dangerous, he often responds with a question of his own.
“Are you going to be buying guns or drugs?” he said. “If not, you’ll be fine.”
Risk, he said, is not unique to any single country. When bad things happen, they are more often the exception than the rule. But he also knows that perceptions can be stubborn, and that perceptions matter.
“I don’t want to minimize what happened,” he said. “But Puerto Vallarta is going to recover a lot more quickly than people expect.”
On Tuesday, with his flight rebooked, Pizá could already see a city getting back on its feet. His Puerto Vallarta office had reopened, and though he’d given his staff the option to stay home, every one of them came in.
Nearby, at Marina Vallarta Golf Club, a public-access layout tucked along the bay, the fairways told a similar story. Pizá stopped by and chatted with the general manager. They’d already done 200 rounds that day and were handing out free margaritas.
His trip home was uneventful. The airport was busy but orderly. His noon flight lifted off on schedule, and when it touched down in San Diego, the passengers cheered.
Pizá said he was glad to be home, too. He’d make a quick stop at the office, then on to his family. But his thoughts were already drifting south.
“I’ll be back in Puerto Vallarta in three weeks,” he said. “I can’t wait.”