Wednesday, March 03, 1999
Will new course lure PGA Tour?
TPC set for Warren Co.
BY GEOFF HOBSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
An Arnold Palmer-designed Tournament Players Club golf course planned for Warren County is being hailed as local golf's equivalent to new stadiums for the Reds and Bengals.
The TPC at River's Bend in Hamilton Township has a good chance to host either a stop on the PGA Tour or Senior PGA Tour, given that all but two of the 16 active TPC courses host one of those events.
“All TPC clubs are built with the capacity to hold a PGA event,” said Chris Smith, director of public relations for PGA Tour/Business.
“There's special consideration for staging, television, hospitality compounds and parking. There have been no decisions made yet about what tournamants might go there.”
The Kroger Senior Classic, currently at The Golf Center at Kings Island, moves to the head of the list.
“When a course of this quality arrives in this market, it's tempting to think ahead to the day it's going to be tournament-ready,” said Don Schumacher, general chairman of the Kroger Senior Classic. “But we're looking forward to the next three years at Kings Island.”
Ground is to be broken at the TPC at River's Bend in two weeks and is scheduled to open in early 2001. The corpo rate/private course might not be tournament ready for two years.
Palmer, the golfing great who has designed five TPC courses, has one ready to go in 2000: The TPC of the Twin Cities in Minneapolis will host the Burnet Senior Classic.
The TPC's newest course in Myrtle Beach is site for this year's Energizer Senior Tour championship. TPC at Sugarloaf in Atlanta was built in 1997 and has the PGA's BellSouth Classic. The closest TPC course to Cincinnati, TPC of Michigan built in 1990 in Dearborn, hosts the Ford Senior Players Championship.
Bill Hines, senior partner of Cincinnati's Hines/Griffin Land Company, which is helping the PGA Tour develop the site, compares the 200-acre facility to the new downtown stadiums.
“People won't have to fly out of Cincinnati any more to play a world-class facility,” said Hines, who worked with Palmer on Tartan Fields in Dublin, Ohio.
“This is actually a better natural piece of land than we had (in Dublin). It's heavily wooded, you've got the Little Miami River wrapping behind the trees with natural water and the open areas are rolling hills.”
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