For now. There remains the considerable task of building a course worthy of
the hype, not to mention Woods’ fee, estimated to be more than $20
million
including real estate sales incentives—nearly 10 times
the highest previous
going rate. The
Cliffs is still working on the permitting for the site, which
sits at
about 4,000 feet and features 50-mile views of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Meanwhile Woods’ design team, led by Beau Welling, formerly Fazio’s top
man, has
yet to finalize a routing—construction is not likely to begin
until mid-2008 and
the course won’t open for at least two years after
that.
When it does, High
Carolina will receive unprecedented scrutiny from insiders and the general
public alike. But Woods is not worried. “It’s a beautiful piece of property,” he
says. “You really can’t mess this up.”
Still, the transition from player to
architect is not necessarily a smooth one. “The tendency for players is to
design courses suited for their games,” says Quentin Lutz of Arthur Hills/Steve
Forrest and Associates. “The real challenge is to make a course suitable for all
levels of players, from tour pros to mid- and high-handicappers.”
Example A
is Jack Nicklaus, who used to build difficult layouts that played to his
strength: long, high fades. “When I first started I could do a golf course one
way,” says Nicklaus, who now has more than 300 design credits. “I could do a
golf course 20 different ways now.
“[Tiger] is a very smart young man and
he’ll figure it out. He certainly can’t go out and do a design himself. He
wouldn’t understand all the things that happen with it. It takes time to learn
that.”
Woods does not have the luxury of starting slowly the way Nicklaus did
in making 23 site visits while helping Pete Dye during the construction of
Harbour Town Golf Links in the late ’60s. For now, Woods is relying on Welling,
also the lead designer at Al Ruwaya, as he learns the finer points and hones a
philosophy. “I’m more of a minimalist,” says Woods. “We’re not going to move a
lot of dirt.”
Considering that minimalists like Tom Doak and the team of
Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have fashioned two of the best new courses—Doak’s
Pacific Dunes and Coore/Crenshaw’s Sand Hills—of the past 15 years, Woods is
saying the right things. Still, there are inconsistencies in his thinking. He
often praises courses that are “right in front of you,” yet one of his favorites
is the Old Course at St. Andrews, an 18-hole enigma of blind shots and
unpredictable bounces.
While Woods trails Nicklaus by just five career
majors, he has no aspirations of tracking down the Golden Bear the architect, at
least in the number of courses. Tiger Woods Design plans to take on a small
number of select projects, which means he can devote attention to each course.
“I’ll be up here as much as I can,” he says. “As you all know, I’m a
perfectionist.”
In addition to holding high expectations for High Carolina,
including a
national ranking and the hosting of big events, Woods has a
specific barometer for success. “I want people to walk off and want to come back
to play it again ASAP,” he says.
History will be a more discerning critic.
For Woods to cement his architecture legacy, he needs to build a monument of the
game, the way other player-architects did: Bobby Jones’ Augusta National,
Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village, Crenshaw’s Sand Hills. Woods, who always has been
playing for history, is aware of the standards his predecessors have set.
“Hopefully one day [I will do that],” he says. “Obviously you have to get the
right situation where you can do that, where you can go ahead and design what
you think is how golf should be played.”
