In February, it was announced 2020 likely would be the final season for Metacomet Golf Club, a historic Donald Ross design in East Providence, Rhode Island.
But the club is not slipping away without a fight from several members.
The club’s ownership group, Metacomet Property Company, which includes 8-time PGA Tour winner and Fox Sports analyst Brad Faxon, announced in February it had reached an agreement to sell the club to Marshall Properties Inc., a Pawtucket-based real estate developer that intends to convert the waterfront site into mixed-use offices and condominiums.
On Mar. 19, Golf Digest reported a group had filed suit against MPC, which had acquired the club only a year earlier. The seven-count lawsuit cited “breach of contract and good faith, misrepresentation and fraud.”
The suit is only on behalf of one group of members and would not resolve all potential claims against MPC. Questions popped up if the real estate deal might be in danger of falling apart.
On Mar. 29, Faxon dismissed the notion as “unfounded,” writing in a text message to Golfweek that the deal was moving “[f]ull steam ahead. [The] lawsuit was withdrawn and statement forthcoming from plaintiffs saying they were without cause and developer is proceeding onward.”
While the plaintiffs’ attorney, Christopher Mulhearn, did not respond to calls and emails requesting confirmation of this claim, publicly available court records indicate that the case is still open, at least for now. On Apr. 6, an Entry of Appearance – a document identifying legal representation for one of the parties in a case – was registered in court.
Back in November 2018, Golfweek reported on the prospects of Metacomet Golf Club – which had amassed significant debt, primarily in the form of back taxes – as it prepared itself for a sale. Three suitors emerged, with the membership eventually settling on Faxon’s group. The reported sale price was $2.2 million.
It seemed like a match made in heaven: A golf course with an ironclad “player’s club” pedigree and the bones to reassert itself as one of the best layouts in New England, and an ownership group led by a Rhode Island celebrity and philanthropic leader who also happened to have grown up there. Faxon and his father, Brad Faxon Sr., are former Metacomet club champions.
In a letter to the club’s board accompanying their proposal, MPC positioned Faxon as their point man for any alterations to the golf course, citing his “unquestioned expertise in golf course design, style, and playability.”
To help Metacomet dig its way out of its financial hole, MPC proposed to develop real estate on the 11th hole and part of the long par-3 12th. This would necessitate rerouting the golf course, a job that was earmarked for Gil Hanse, a longtime friend of Faxon’s – in the 2000s the pair collaborated on the renovation of TPC Boston in Norton, Massachusetts.
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However, Faxon said, there were serious impediments to rejuvenating Ross’s layout.
“The course is adjacent to tidal waters and has some smaller internally flagged wetlands that if we did even minor work we would have to get approvals from DEM [Department of Environmental Management], CRMC [Coastal Resources Management Council] and maybe even Army Corps [of Engineers],” Faxon wrote. “Any meaningful work would have required millions of dollars and closing [the] course for at least a year.”
Hanse’s design partner, Jim Wagner, who visited Metacomet in March 2019 – before MPC closed on the sale – said no formal master plan was ever developed for the club.
In 2019 MPC made some improvements – some trees were limbed or removed, the clubhouse interior received new flooring and a lick of paint to freshen things up – but the group also made moves the membership found off-putting. They experimented with allowing outside play at a handful of price points, causing grumbling among members who were still paying private club-level monthly dues.
The new owners indicated that non-member play was seen in part as an opportunity “to market membership opportunities to all who play.”
“They changed the logo and the sign out front,” said Eric Churchill, Metacomet’s club president at the time. “[But] they did not execute on their business plan. They never produced a marketing campaign to attract new members. …
“They were shrinking our access to the golf course to accommodate public play. The public was increasingly using the members’ locker room, and even going through members’ lockers. It wasn’t a healthy environment.”
Over the winter, events took a dizzying turn. The membership received two letters – one on Feb. 20, another on Feb. 27 – in which MPC announced its intent to sell the club.
“Our high hopes and primary intent were to grow the club’s membership to levels necessary to support the club with minimal ‘outside’ play and to maintain the club as a private club,” the first letter read. “Based on the golf dynamics of the club and the state, and the downward trends of the golf industry, in general we do not see a path toward our ability to do that as a private or even semi-private club.”
Just a week later, the group announced the sale to Marshall Properties. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Metacomet’s membership feels blindsided and betrayed by the loss of the club.
“What’s so disheartening about this whole thing,” Churchill said, “is that when I had to announce the club was for sale [in 2018], we didn’t lose members. I wasn’t sure we’d even survive until the closing, but people offered to pre-pay their dues through the transition period. That was the kind of membership core we had.”
Steve Landi, general manager of Tri-State Golf – the company MPC beat out in the membership’s vote for the initial sale over the winter of 2019 – said they were not contacted by MPC with an opportunity for Tri-State to buy and maintain the club before MPC entered an agreement with Marshall.
Questions endure in Metacomet’s final chapter. MPC, according to multiple reports, was spooked by losses of as much as $500,000 in its first year. It’s easy to imagine how the group may have felt it had tried to cut off too much of the dogleg, but was a single golf season enough time to really test the viability of its business model? Was it enough time to make the amenity investments that might have helped the club regain its competitive position?
“Everyone was hoping for a white knight to allow what was going on there to continue,” Brad Faxon told the Providence Journal on Mar. 8, “but without a strong capital infusion we were going to keep losing big money.”
Of course, Metacomet members would be forgiven for believing that they’d already found their white knight – Faxon himself.