Sponsored by:
There is understandable curiosity about Tiger's foray into course design. Typically, a champion golfer either partners with an established golf architect—Arnold Palmer with Ed Seay, for example, or Ben Crenshaw with Bill Coore—or hires a staff of practiced landscape engineers and architects a la Jack Nicklaus, whose design company has produced 310 courses in 30 countries. Tiger would seem to be leaning toward the latter model (he took advantage of Nicklaus's generous offer to let Bell visit his North Palm Beach offices to study the golf course operation), but he turns vague when asked who will actually read the topographical maps and produce the construction drawings.
In L.A., Tiger had assured me, "I will not be hiring some guy to design a golf course. I'll be hands on and involved in it." He was more forthcoming about his design philosophy. "My tastes are toward the old and traditional. I'm a big fan of the Aussie-built courses in Melbourne, the sand-belt courses. I'm also a tremendous fan of some of the courses in our Northeast." Tiger didn't name those courses, but I mentally ticked off some classic layouts that he probably likes: The Country Club, Shinnecock Hills, Merion, Baltusrol, Winged Foot.
"I'm not one who thoroughly enjoys playing point B to point C to point D golf," he continued. "The courses I like are the ones where you have the option to play different shots. I enjoy working the ball on the ground and using different avenues." "Like Royal Liverpool?" I asked, naming the English course on which Tiger won the 2006 British Open using a 19th-century arsenal of low, scooting tee shots (played almost exclusively with irons and fairway metals) and ground-hugging approaches.
He smiled at the memory. "Liverpool this year and St. Andrews in 2000 are the only times I've seen the fairways faster than the greens. You hit a putt from the fairway, it was running one speed. It got to the green, the putt slowed down." His smile broadened. "That's not like most golf courses, but that's what I like to see. It fits my eye."
Now, walking on the Arabian desert under dark, roiling clouds, I pause to squint, to fit my eyes to the scrubby slopes and narrow washes of Tiger's blank canvas, trying to see a golf course. Pretty soon, I see it.
Tiger says the two years he spent at Stanford are starting to pay off. . . . "I was majoring in econ, but the econ I was learning was your supply-and-demand curve, monetary policy. It was mostly math," he says. "I was never going to be an economic analyst or anything like that, but some of it is starting to become applicable now, as I start to get into the business."
I want to dazzle Tiger with some of my own financial acumen—how I bought Garmin at 17.50 and Apple at 21 before the split—but I'm afraid he might have heard that I drive a hail-damaged '94 Volvo. Instead I ask if he has ever sought business advice from Nicklaus, Palmer or Gary Player, the original Big Three of ancillary income. "I have not talked to them," he says.
I can tell, though, that he knows what I know—that the Big Three, while wealthy and widely admired in business circles, have found commerce to be a cruder and meaner game than golf. Nicklaus suffered losses to his bottom line and reputation in the late 1990s when his publicly traded Golden Bear Golf Inc. tanked because of accounting irregularities at a course-construction subsidiary. Palmer got dragged into ugly litigation in the late '80s when his partner in a chain of Arnold Palmer car dealerships was brought down on fraud charges, and again in '90 when homeowners near Florida's ritzy Isleworth community (where Tiger would later move) won a $6.6 million judgment against Palmer and his development partners over lakefront pollution and flooding.
Player, too, has had setbacks, most notably with Gary Player Direct.com, an e-commerce company that lost millions in the dotcom fever of the late '90s. And while all three have ventured into the golf equipment business, none of their signature club lines has ever captured more than a tiny share of the U.S. market.
"It all depends on how much risk you want to take on," Tiger says. "Arnold has dibble-dabbled in a bunch of different things, but he's never put himself at complete risk, where the other two basically have. You can reap the rewards by doing that. Or you can get shelled." He shrugs. "Obviously, I don't go into much risk."
