Excerpt from yesterday's Greenville (SC) News:
Unless, maybe, it was the scary thought that occurred to Jim Anthony a few months ago when he was at work with business partner Tiger Woods at the site of High Carolina, the eighth and last golf course in The Cliffs Communities developments near Asheville, N.C.
"He's walked that course more than any designer we've ever had at this stage of construction," Anthony, president of The Cliffs Communities, said of Woods. "We had 17 holes with Southern exposure except for No. 9, it stayed frozen longer than any other. We talked to Tiger about it and he said, 'We gotta re-route it.' "
Woods, the 14-time majors champion makes his return to Augusta National this week for the 2009 Masters less than two weeks after winning at Bay Hill in Orlando, Fla. That victory, his 66th on the Professional Golfers' Association Tour, signaled his full competitive return from knee surgery last June.
Up at High Carolina that day, Anthony couldn't help thinking about the publicity that would be generated had Woods made a misstep on the property where his first golf course in the United States will be under construction later this year.
"He came up there with his knee injury when most people would have just said, 'Hey team, go make it work,' " Anthony said. "He wanted to see (the ninth hole) himself, get a good look.
"It scared me to death," Anthony said. "He's up there walking on rocks, checking it out, climbing around and all I could see was a news headline, 'Tiger re-injures knee working on course.' He was careful, he was smart about it.
"He does things other people wouldn't do. He's amazing."
Woods and Anthony, the 65 year-old Upstate developer, have proven to be a good, if unlikely match. You might not expect paths to merge so successfully for a Stanford-educated, West Coast son of a Green Beret veteran and a high school-educated South Carolinian son of a factory worker, but there's clearly a bond with these two.
For Woods, it was all laid out in the painstaking mentoring he received from his father Earl, who passed away in May of 2006, and his mother, Kultida. He began playing golf at an early age and you could say he took to it rather well, almost as though his quest to overtake Jack Nicklaus and his record 18 major victories was planned all along.
"When he was 12 he could whip a lot of 18-year olds but his father wouldn't let him play those guys," Anthony said. "As a result, he was expected to win every time he went out, so his life has been imprinted with that expectation.
"His dad and mom did an incredible job with him, like (a) textbook on how to raise a champion," he said. "He was born with those genes."
Anthony came to this partnership from a different direction. He was a telephone repairman for Southern Bell after high school when his uncle in Charlotte made him a proposition.
"He offered me a chance to buy some property, 100 acres at $200 an acre and we sold it for $600 an acre," Anthony said. "That would have been in about 1963 and it gave me the idea that 'this might be even better than climbing telephone poles all day.'
"I found the next tract in Pickens County, we went in on that," Anthony said, "then we bought a big chunk - 600 acres - and that's actually where I live today."
Anthony is a life-long outdoorsman. He said he has jogged three days a week, "my whole life," and retains a passion for fishing, quail hunting and other outdoor activities. The seven Cliffs Communities golf courses have brought him in contact with Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and other golf icons, but High Carolina was a special piece of property he envisioned for only one person.
"We purchased the property at High Carolina and I just believed that this needed to be a piece of land for him to build a golf course," Anthony said. "There was never going to be another piece of land like this at 4,000 feet with 50-mile views and Southern exposure. We contacted his organization and arranged a meeting. If Tiger wasn't going to be interested, we weren't going to build a golf course there."
Woods was interested.
"What impresses me about Tiger is what comes out of his mouth is what's on his mind - what he says comes from his heart," Anthony said. "Some folks, if they were trying to make a deal, they might say, 'This is OK, it might have possibilities,' but not him. He saw it and he lit up, he said, 'What a great piece of land,' his enthusiasm and passion came though immediately."
Anthony said site planning and permitting is progressing at the site and construction should begin before the end of the year. It is expected to open in the fall of 2011.