NAPA, Calif. – Phil Mickelson isn’t the only World Golf Hall of Famer missing from this year’s Fortinet Championship. The event is also Miller lite – as in Johnny Miller.
The two-time major winner and retired NBC Sports lead golf analyst has served as tournament ambassador ever since he helped lure the event here in 2014, making appearances on the television broadcast and partaking in the trophy ceremony on Sunday. It had become one of the few times that Miller, 75, made a public appearance since retiring from NBC in 2019.
Why the change? Primarily because Miller is no longer an owner in Silverado Resort, the host course of the tournament, after being embroiled in a lawsuit. Miller purchased a 30.6-percent stake in a limited partnership that bought the famed resort in 2010 and sold the landmark property, which includes two Robert Trent Jones Jr. courses – the North and the South – in February.
When Miller first stepped foot on property to compete in the PGA Tour’s 1968 Kaiser International Open as an amateur, he could sense there was something special about the place.
“I liked the country, the courses, the open fields, the smells,” Miller once said. “It felt like home.”
So much so that after turning pro and marrying his wife Linda, they honeymooned at Silverado in one of the condos.
“One thing led to another and we bought a condo the next year on the sixth fairway of the North Course, then built a house in ’74 on the lake (at No. 11),” said Miller, who won the tournament there in 1974 and ’75, and had five of his six kids born in Napa.
In 2010, Silverado went on the market and Miller partnered to buy the resort and spa with among others Roger Kent, founder of Rug Doctor, who built the original machine in his garage and sold the company in 2007 after building it to $300 million in revenue. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the price of the resort was for “far upwards of $20 million” – a post-housing bubble discount off of the $110 million the previous Japanese owners paid in 1989 – and then Miller and company set about transforming it. “I saw what Silverado could become,” Miller said at the time.
The white Mansion, overlooking Milliken Creek, is the hub of the 1,200-acre property, with a lounge inside (and media room during the Fortinet Championship). Miller breathed new life into the 36-hole complex in what he has described as the first course he redesigned himself, and has hosted the PGA Tour’s season-opening tournament since 2014. Miller served as the unofficial face of the resort during the event.
But in 2020, Kent sued Miller and his partners in a $50-million lawsuit in which he alleged that his partners “committed fraud, breach of contract, negligence, and misconduct with oppression and malice,” and that the resort was in “dire” financial shape. As first reported by the Napa Valley Register, the complaint said the resort would soon be “insolvent” and had “substantial negative working capital.”
Affiliates of Colorado-based KSL Capital Partners LLC, a private equity firm specializing in travel and leisure enterprises, and New York’s Arcade Capital LLC, a private real estate investment firm that specializes in the hotel management and global wellness space, announced in a Feb. 1 joint press release that they had acquired the property. Terms were not disclosed, but the Napa Valley Register reported the sales price was $62.4 million.
Miller’s presence will be missed at the tournament. A spokesperson at Golf Channel said there were no plans for Miller to join the broadcast this week as he typically did and tournament organizers confirmed that come Sunday when the trophy is to be handed out, it won’t be Miller’s time to do the honors as he had in the past. All that remains are the touches he made to the course and the plaque for Champ’s Bridge that honors Miller’s father, Larry, who called his son “Champ.”
