Two days after winning the 2007 PGA Championship at one of golf’s most venerable
addresses, Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tiger Woods steps out
of a black Range Rover at the Cliffs Valley in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, a
small town 20 miles north of Greenville, the hometown of Jay Haas and more
infamously, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson.
Following his expulsion from baseball
along with seven Chicago White Sox teammates for fixing the 1919 World Series,
Jackson returned to Greenville shrouded in shame. He eventually opened a liquor
store, which Ty Cobb visited years later to buy a fifth of bourbon. The former
baseball greats performed the transaction as if they were strangers until Cobb
finally said, “Don’t you know me, Joe?” “Sure—I know you, Ty,” Jackson replied. “I just didn’t think anyone I used to
know up there wanted to recognize me again.” Woods has no such problems.
Whether he is selling watches, conducting an interview with Matt Lauer on the
Today show, or making his first public appearance in upstate South Carolina,
everyone wants to be associated with him. Wearing a navy suit and white shirt
sans tie, Woods enters the Cliffs Valley clubhouse and walks around the crowd
that has gathered, eager to catch a glimpse of sport’s biggest star.
Woods
strides onto the podium, sits behind a table and playfully announces, “I guess
we all know why we’re here.” The occasion is the announcement of his
long-awaited first design project in the U.S., the Cliffs at High Carolina.
(Woods’ first course, Al Ruwaya in a development subtly named Tiger Woods Dubai,
is so far away that it barely registers on the American golf radar.)
From an
architecture perspective, the atmosphere at Cliffs Valley is similar to the
sense of anticipation that surrounded Woods’ first professional tournament at
Milwaukee’s Brown Deer Park Golf Course in 1996. And when High Carolina opens,
the golf world will be expecting a debut no less spectacular than Woods’
12-stroke win in the 1997 Masters.
