Obviously the PGA of America is pretty flush — all you have to do is gander an eye at its new headquarters building in Frisco, Texas about 15 minutes from Dallas Cowboy central.
Seth Waugh unveiled it last week and wow, what a site to behold — all 106,621 square feet of it. Can you imagine what it will take to upkeep that behemoth??
Gets pretty damn hot in Texas — it will probably cost $20,000 a month to heat and cool that place. Doesn’t matter — obviously there’s a lot of money to be made when you own a major championship (the PGA) and the U.S. half of the Ryder Cup. And the headquarters building is simply the centerpiece of what’s going to be a 660-acre mixed use campus.
It’s a $550 million project and that’s pretty thrifty considering the Infidels (aka the Saudis) spent that much money on four of five players for their LIV exhibition series.
“Welcome to our field of dreams,” was the greeting from PGA boss Seth Waugh. “This is a rare project which has turned out better than we ever dreamed it would.”
In case you’re wondering how all this ended up in what used to be a sleepy bedroom community outside Dallas, well Frisco basically made the PGA an offer it couldn’t refuse.
For the initial development of the public portion of the project, the city of Frisco was on the hook for $13.3 million; the Frisco Community Development Corp., $13.3 million; Frisco Independent School District, $5.8 million; and the Frisco Economic Development Corp., $2.5 million. The city will also provide performance incentives, which could reach as high as $74 million.
And the state of Texas will allow PGA Frisco to run without hotel or sales taxes for 10 years, along with some mixed beverage taxes. That is expected to save the project somewhere in the neighborhood of $62 million over the first 10 years.
Frisco’s Economic Development Corp. is also on the hook for about $1 million a year to help with the relocation from Florida, job creation and other incentives. Those massive numbers, especially for a city that only has about 225,000 residents, were enough to woo the PGA of America, which had a number of major suitors.
Add two championship golf courses, a short course and a practice area that spares no expense and you’ve got one sweet, sprawling home.
All we hope is that Waugh doesn’t jack up the annual dues for the 28,000 hard working men and women professionals that make up the PGA of America.
Gianna Clemente Makes LPGA Tour History For Qualifiers:
The LPGA Tour heads to Cincinnati this week for the Kroger Queen City Championship and there’s a young, rising star in the field who just happened to make some LPGA Tour history this week.
Fourteen-year-old Gianna Clemente had previously made it into the Canadian Open, her second event as a Monday qualifier.
This week, on a rainy Monday Gianna cruised around Kenwood Country Club (site of this week’s championship) and shot seven-under par 65 to blow away the rest of the field. She was the third player in Tour history to do this, and by far the youngest.
“I think it kind of sunk in this morning,” Clemente said of her feat, although the magnitude of matching a record set seven years before she was born is not something you expect a 14-year-old to grasp.
“Last night was kind of crazy because we were trying to get back to the hotel and stuff,” Gianna said. “We got back really late, and I didn’t have time to think about it. I woke up this morning and was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to another LPGA event today.’ It was kind of crazy this morning thinking about the last three weeks and the qualifiers.”
