Tag: Tepetonka

What do Jim Nantz, OCM, a Gjallarhorn and a bonus par-3 have in common? Tepetonka

Two friends are dreaming their dreams, just as they did 47 years ago.

NEW LONDON, Minn. – Jim Nantz has been living out his boyhood dream as the face of CBS Sports for more than three decades. Sometimes it takes a dreamer to see the dream of another dear friend unfolding.

“There’s something special when you’re looking at someone who has a vision and a dream, and you believe in them and you know that dream is coming true,” Nantz said on a warm, sunny day in late July to some of the founding members of Tepetonka Golf Club, a 228-acre, private golf club being built in the western corner of Minnesota by his University of Houston golf teammate Mark Haugejorde. Nantz fixed his eyes on his longtime friend and added, “And I saw it again today. First met you in 1977, holy smokes, 47 years ago. I’m so darn proud of you. It is your calling.”

Haugejorde was a senior on the Cougars team, a gentle giant who could crush it off the tee, when Nantz was a freshman, and Nantz eventually would move into Haugejorde’s room after he graduated. Fast forward to 2020 when Haugejorde was the high bidder for a Zoom call with Nantz at Tom Lehman’s charity event.

“You didn’t have to buy this,” Nantz told him when they spoke.

“It was for a good cause,” Haugejorde said with a smile.

Jim Nantz tours the property at Tepetonka Golf Club in New London, Minnesota, his fourth visit to the private destination club being built by his college friend. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

Nantz had a better idea. He invited Haugejorde, who serves as executive director of At the Turn, a non-profit devoted to helping high school students and young adults, to bring his top donor out to Cypress Point Golf Club in Pebble Beach, California – where Nantz is a member – and they’d play a round together at the famed course and have a meal.

“I thought that will go over pretty well,” Haugejorde recalled.

Construction is expected to be completed by the end of 2024 on Tepetonka Golf Club in New London, Minnesota. (Courtesy Tepetonka Club)

A friendship was rekindled, and during that trip Haugejorde shared his dream to create a club in his golf-crazed home state of Minnesota, much like his father had done years before at Little Crow Country Club (now a 27-hole facility known as Little Crow Resort), a public course about 90 miles west of Minneapolis. Nantz told him it was his true calling to do so. Two months later, Haugejorde stumbled upon the land that is being shaped into Tepetonka while driving his 94-year-old mother to Little Crow to play nine holes. Coasting past land where he used to pheasant hunt as a kid, he took a left turn and was struck by the expanse of farmland, the beautiful cedars and a ravine. He looked out the window and said, “That’s it.”

Haugejorde acquired the land and consulted a number of leading course designers, but it was a podcast he heard with the team of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead that convinced him that OCM, who are headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, was right for his job.

“When Mark contacted us during Covid, we saw the maps and some pictures. The first time we first turned up, it was 17 degrees. It was April by the way, Australians aren’t meant for this stuff,” Ogilvy said, drawing laughter. “We looked at him and said this is incredible land and it reminded us of St. Andrews Beach, a course all three of us love (near) Melbourne.”

During that first visit, OCM walked the land as Haugejorde waited patiently for them to give the verdict on a potential routing. “It was worth the wait,” Haugejorde said.

“It just fits,” Ogilvy said. “We haven’t really moved much dirt. The routing is just perfect, tees are generally next to the greens. … Every time I come back, it’s better than I imagined.”

“It’s like building a house,” Mead explained, “and not a lot happens in the start as you put the frame up and you start to get a feel for what the rooms are going to look like, but we’re getting to the point where we can really see the golf course. After this point, we start putting the sand in the bunkers and grassing the fairways.”

The par-3 third hole at Tepetonka Golf Club in New London, Minnesota, under construction in July 2024 (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

Construction is expected to be completed by the end of the year, and the hope is for there to be some walking-only preview play in late summer of 2025 before the curtain officially comes up in spring 2026 in concert with the opening of the Supper Club.

That’s one of several ways Nantz will be intimately involved with the project and making Haugejorde’s dream come to fruition. Nantz grew curious as he heard about the progress being made on Tepetonka. While in town to broadcast a Minnesota Vikings game, he took CBS partner Tony Romo to a steak dinner in Minneapolis to meet the OCM architects and Haugejorde. Nantz is quick to point out that he has stood on many shoulders to get where he is in life and that his Houston Cougar “brothers” always believed in his crazy dream of calling the Masters and interviewing his roommate Fred Couples as the champion someday. He believes in his old pal’s dream and ponied up for a founding membership, but he’s also going to have a bigger role, too, helping design Hog Heaven, the club’s short course.

“I’ve always had this dream if I wasn’t a broadcaster the thing I think would be the most fun thing to be a part of is to shape the Earth and be in golf course architecture,” Nantz said.

Geoff Ogilvy of OCM (left) and Jim Nantz of CBS Sports tour Tepetonka Golf Club, a private golf destination that Ogilvy and his design partners are constructing on two hours west of Minneapolis. (Courtesy Tepetonka Club)

“We love building short courses because you can get a bit wilder and have fun with it,” Ogilvy said. “No one is worried about their score or handicap. It’s all about fun.”

A year ago, during another visit for a Vikings game, Nantz invited a bunch of his CBS crew to see for themselves the land that is becoming Tepetonka. The fescue was high, but Nantz came prepared with a pad and a pen and that’s when he had an idea. He’s famously designed two replica holes at his homes – famed No. 7 in his backyard at his Pebble Beach home and the green at No. 13 at Augusta National at his home in Nashville. Family and friends compete to make an ace and get their name on “The Rock of Fame.” Nantz envisions members and their guests retiring to the area he dubbed “Hog Heaven,” a natural amphitheater just below the rim looking down on the scope of the whole project to try their hands at a downhill one-shotter not far from the clubhouse.

“These old Houston Cougars started noodling over this concept and what ended up on this scratch pad – you call it a plank, I call it a platform or a stage – it will be raised and there will be a rail around that stage where you’re at ankle level looking at a player on top of that tee and hitting down on the ninth green at the short course. Everyone here that day will be encouraged to come together at Hog Heaven. To summon everyone to the site, what will be played?

“The Gjallarhorn,” Haugejorde said of the horn according to Norse mythology that announced the arrival of the gods and best-known these days to ignite another Skol chant at Minnesota Vikings games.

“I was just so afraid I was going to pronounce it wrong,” Nantz said. “Of course, the Gjallarhorn. You’ll hear it all over the course. It’s a warning to come on back. At 5 o’clock, grab whatever your favorite beverage is and let’s go to The Rock of Fame. Let’s gather as one. Groups are coming in from around the country and all over the world. You get to meet people. There aren’t going to be 150 people a day. It’s going to be an experience, it’s going to be intimate, it’s going to be fun.

“Everyone gets a chance to walk up on that stage, hit a shot down that hill, the ball will hang in the air for the longest time, and if anybody makes it, and they will, their name will be on a plaque on our own boulder, our own Rock of Fame experience, with everybody cheering them on and our own announcer.

“You take your one swing, your one little pitch down the hill to try to leave your mark of permanence at Tepetonka at Hog Heaven. The last time I said ‘Hog Heaven,’ Arkansas was winning the national championship in basketball in 1995. It has a whole new meaning to me. This is Hog Heaven. Haugie, pal, thanks for believing in that too.”

He paused and then added, “Thank you for not believing it’s one of my crazier ideas.”

Two friends are dreaming their dreams, just as they did 47 years ago.

Could Geoff Ogilvy be his generation’s Ben Crenshaw as a course architect? That and more in this architecture-heavy Q&A with the former U.S. Open champ

“I think I’m one of the only guys on the range without a launch monitor.”

If you’re going to be stuck in a car for a two-plus-hour drive, you’d be hard-pressed to enjoy better company than Australian golfer Geoff Ogilvy.

In August, on the drive from Minneapolis to the western corner of the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where he and his design partners Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead are preparing to build Tepetonka, Minnesota’s first private golf destination on 228 acres of gorgeous rolling land with Shakopee Creek cutting through a quarter of the property, Ogilvy and I (and PR man/wheelman Matthew Gibb) talked at length about his shift into the golf-course design business among other things.

I’m probably not the first to say this, and admittedly it’s early days for his venture into the architecture space, but Ogilvy could be his generation’s Ben Crenshaw, who made a smooth transition from Masters champion to one of the most coveted designers in golf. OCM as the next Coore-Crenshaw? We can only hope to be so lucky.

Ogilvy turned pro in 1998, just as Tiger Woods was beginning to rule the game, and Ogilvy did well to win eight times on the PGA Tour (plus another four times on the DP World Tour), including the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. He was a member of the International Team for the Presidents Cup three times and has been a vice captain on the last three teams. It seems inevitable that he will get his turn at the captaincy (and when he does the U.S. may finally have met its match in that event).

Ogilvy, 46, has reduced his play in recent years, including moving back to his native Australia for a time, and is starting to make a name for himself in the design world with work done at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, back home in Melbourne at Peninsula-Kingswood and is in the process of completing a significant re-do of Medinah No. 3 near Chicago, which will host the 2026 Presidents Cup. (He also mentioned a course the firm is building in Georgia but wouldn’t disclose the name.)

A couple hours in the car flew by and the discussion continued over lunch and in between his site visit. Here are some of the highlights.

Jim Nantz is helping his college teammate create a golf destination in Minnesota

“He’s going to bring this part of the world and golf to the whole nation to see something this state has never seen before.”

NEW LONDON, Minn. – Even before Jim Nantz stepped foot on property at Tepetonka Club, he dubbed it “Minnesota’s masterpiece.”

Those words had a nice alliterative ring to them but now that he had toured the grounds for the first time, including what will become The Prox, a short course to be designed there by the team of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Meade, in the western corner of the Land of 10,000 Lakes, he smiled and doubled down, declaring in his familiar voice, “This land will become world-renowned.”

Nantz, the 64-year-old voice of CBS whom sports fans have welcomed into their living rooms and mancaves for more than three decades, may have a thing or two to do with that. He’s serving as design consultant on The Prox but as he so elegantly put it, “This is like centuries ago telling Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine Chapel, ‘Why don’t you do this?'”

Nantz’s only golf architecture credit to his name consists of a backyard hole, a miniaturized replica of the seventh at Pebble Beach Golf Links, that he created not far from the real thing. So, why is he being allowed in the sandbox to draw up holes? In a word, friendship, but stick around for the full story.

Mark Haugejorde’s special bond with Nantz dates 46 years back to their college days. They were teammates on the University of Houston men’s golf team and famed coach Dave Williams assigned Haugejorde, a senior at the time, to befriend the freshmen, which included Nantz, Fred Couples and another future PGA Tour winner, Blaine McCallister.

“He was this scrawny kid and all he wanted to be was a sportscaster,” Haugejorde said of Nantz.

Tepetonka Club
Blue-tipped flags mark tees, red-tipped flags the center lines and green-tipped stakes for the greens at Tepetonka Club in Minnesota. (Courtesy Tepetonka Club)

Houston’s golf team was a juggernaut, winning 16 NCAA titles in a span of 30 years, though Nantz is quick to point out he contributed nothing to the cause.

“I was without question – I’m not trying to be humble about it – the worst player in the history of the program,” he said.

But Williams didn’t become a legendary coach without learning to build a team where every player had a role and he carved out a special one for Nantz.

“I was kind of the den mother,” Nantz recalled. “I think he saw in me as someone who was a real goal-minded individual because the first time I met him I told him I didn’t want to be a professional golfer, I wanted to talk about professional golfers. I wanted to work for CBS since I was 11 years old. I wanted to call and host the Masters. That was what the dream was that was in my heart. So, he found a role for me. He put me in a room with the three best incoming freshmen. At the time, I was working hard to crack the top 10 and try to get close to the top 5 that would play the tournament. But I made sure every day that my roommates got up, ate breakfast, went off to school and did their homework.”

Nantz recalled Haugejorde as “a towering presence for us incoming freshmen and generous to us too as young kids.” They stayed in touch and a few years ago Haugejorde visited Nantz in California and they played a round at Cypress Point Club and had dinner at Pebble Beach. Haugejorde shared his dream to build a golf course, much like his father, who during a stint in the military was asked to build a golf course for the officer’s club in Japan in 1947. Later, his father spearheaded efforts to build Little Crow Country Club (now a 27-hole facility known as Little Crow Resort), a public course, two hours west of Minneapolis. Haugejorde picked up the game there and won the 1973 high school state championship. He was convinced that he had found land for a course and a motivated seller but when his business partner walked the site, he had to level with Haugejorde: “Mark, it’s just not special,” he said. Back to the drawing board.

Any sports fan worth his salt knows how the dreams of those young Houston golfers that Haugejorde looked after during his senior year panned out.

“Fred said he’s going to win the Masters. That’s all we ever talked about. That it was going to happen,” said Nantz, of what came to fruition in 1992. “And they all looked at me like naturally I was going to work for CBS one day. Not that I was entitled to it, but they were living the dream with me and they’ve lived it every step of the way for 38 years. They’ve been with me and I’m grateful for that. We were this amazing group of believers. I believed in them, they believed in me and our lives turned out the way we wanted them to be.”

Tepetonka Club
A clearing for a future tee box at Tepetonka Club. (Photo: Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

On May 22, 2021, just a few months after dinner with Nantz at Pebble, Haugejorde was driving his 94-year-old mother to Little Crow to play nine holes. Coasting past land where he used to pheasant hunt as a kid, he took a left turn and was struck by the expanse of farmland, the beautiful cedars and a ravine and slowed his roll as he continued half a mile down a gravel road. He looked out the window and said, “That’s it.”

He stopped the car and used onX, an app used by hunters with GPS tracker, waypoints, property lines and accurate land ownership names, to mark the spot and took a picture at 8:21 a.m.

“It’s going to be framed,” Haugejorde said.

The land, which has plenty of movement, reminded the architectural team of Ogilvy, Cocking and Meade of the sand hills of St. Andrews Beach back home in their native Melbourne, Australia. There’s Shakopee Creek, a tributary of the Chippewa River, which cuts through a quarter of Tepetonka’s property. Visiting the property for the first time over Easter weekend, the Aussies had to borrow jackets from Haugejorde when snow fell. Inside the warmth of Haugejorde’s mother’s lake home, Cocking and Meade sat with laptops facing each other as if they were playing Battleship as Ogilvy looked over their shoulders at the topography of the land.

“I was just doing laps around the table as we went back and forth saying, ‘What if we did this? What if we did that?’ ” said Ogilvy, the former U.S. Open winner.

The future site of “The Dead End,” one of the comfort and refreshment stands to be built at Tepetonka Club. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

OCM figured they could get a hole or two along Shakopee Creek but it turns out the water will weave in and out of play and should be visually or strategically involved in the layout on seven or eight occasions. Some cut lines, paths and tree removal are underway with blue-tipped flags marking tees, red-tipped flags for the center lines and green-tipped stakes for the greens. Construction will commence in 2024 with a course opening scheduled for 2025.

“It’s a pretty well-worn marketing spiel that was used a lot on sites like this that God intended this to be a golf course. But it’s quite amazing how suited the land is to golf,” Cocking said. “It’s on coastal sand dunes. The spacing of the dunes and size of the dunes, the contours and scale of the dunes basically play through the valleys or the tops of the dunes, from dune to dune.”

When Haugejorde let Nantz know he had found his property, Nantz agreed to join as a founding member and tabbed the project his pal’s “true calling.”

“He’s finishing that script,” Nantz said. “His father brought golf to this area. Now he’s going to bring this part of the world and golf to the whole nation to see something this state has never seen before. He has these three genius guys to shape this land to make this an iconic place. He could not have chosen a better team, and it is a team, which is another thing I really admire about them.”

Tepetonka is Minnesota’s first entry into the private golf destinations category. The whole notion of destination golf began with Nebraska’s Sand Hills in 1994 and the model of excellence was defined by Oregon’s Bandon Dunes, which serves resort play, in 1999. If Bandon Dunes’ owner Mike Keiser had asked the National Golf Foundation to conduct a feasibility study, NGF president and CEO Joe Beditz said the answer would have been, why bother? In short, no metrics would have advised building one course let alone five that have each become bucket-list destinations. But what was once bold and audacious now is becoming commonplace.

“That’s where most of the industry is moving right now,” Beditz said. “In a survey we did just last week, 5 million golfers, 1 out of 4, are highly interested in visiting destination golf. The demand is there. Baby boomers are 59-77 years old with 10,000 a day reaching the retirement age of 65. The demand for a product like this especially in the vacuum of Minnesota is brilliant and I think it will become part of a very important Midwest rota as it pertains to golf.”

And so just last month Nantz flew in to West Central Minnesota ahead of broadcasting the BMW Championship in suburban Chicago and walked The Prox and broke bread with Haugejorde, several of his fellow founding members and “the three geniuses”who will integrate the short course into Tepetonka’s practice facility.

“I’m in awe of these three,” Nantz said of OCM. “I don’t know what I can impart at all because they’re on top of it. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve spent a lot of my life around the greatest golf courses in the world. I’ve been a member at some of the finest golf courses in the world. I need golf like I need oxygen. And I know when I see things that are done the right way. If there is anything that I see that can make the club a little better, I will talk to my buddy Mark or Haugie.”

Nantz could have his pick of the litter of golf courses to associate his brand with if he wanted to. Make no mistake, he is here because of his fellowship with his fellow Cougar.

“When a brother comes over and says I’d like you to be a part of this, it’s all coming back full circle for me. I believe in him. I believe what’s inside that heart and inside that head. I believe he has great judgment,” Nantz said. “I plan on spending some time here. I’m at a point in my life where I want to do the things that make me happy. I think I always have but early in your career you’re trying to make sure you do all the right steps and your career is growing and you’re trying to manage a family at the same time, which is more important than anything. I’ve been able to do all that. The things that I want to hitch my wagon to these days are the two most important things: with people I want to be with and as a father.”

Nantz continued: “I want to bring my son here. I want to bring my friends here. It’s going to be great. This is just early stages, lots to do but it’s amazing to see where they’ve already gotten with the routing, the plan, the vision. It’s an incredible team. I can promise you one thing: Haugie’s going to make you proud, he’s going to make Minnesota proud. And I’m going to sit back and cheer him on every step of the way, just like we did for one another 46 years ago at the University of Houston.”

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Watch: Jim Nantz surprises Minnesota high school football team at practice

“Nothing ever takes away what you did last year but go win it again. It would be pretty sweet to double down on it.”

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NEW LONDON, Minn. – It was a victory unlike any other.

On the final play of the Minnesota State High School Class 3A championship football game, New London-Spicer Wildcats needed a miracle at U.S. Bank Stadium and they got it. The Minnesota Miracle II as it was dubbed — a Hail Mary with a lateral for a game-winning touchdown — went down as one of ESPN’s plays of the year.

On Friday morning, CBS announcer Jim Nantz visited the team’s training camp and gave them an inspirational speech. Nantz was in town to do a site visit at Tepetonka, a destination private golf club being built nearby, where he’s the design consultant on the short course and a founding member. One of the Wildcats’ assistant football coach’s doubles as the men’s golf coach, and attended a dinner hosted by Mark Haugejorde, the founder of Tepetonka and Class of 1971 at New London-Spicer, and attended by Nantz, who wanted to come meet the team.

 

Ahead of the semifinals of the football state playoffs, Nantz and his CBS NFL partner Tony Romo had recorded an encouraging message to the team. After they won the final in dramatic fashion, Nantz and Romo sent a congratulatory video from the airport after calling the NFL’s Kansas City-Cincinnati game.

“We felt attached to you. We were pulling for you,” Nantz said on Friday as the team formed a circle around him and listened on one knee. “We have our own team just like you guys. It’s going to be 23 weeks all the way to Las Vegas and calling the Super Bowl,” Nantz said. “You want to win it again. Nothing ever takes away what you did last year but go win it again. It would be pretty sweet to double down on it.

“Being part of a team is the greatest thing in the world. When you have a brotherhood like this, one common goal, it’s special. It’s going to be there for the rest of your life. You guys are united forever,” he said before adding, “I’m inspired by all of you.”

Jim Nantz named design consultant on short course at club being designed by Geoff Ogilvy and his partners at OCM

“If I wasn’t a broadcaster, I think the most fun thing to be a part of is to shape the Earth … “

Jim Nantz and his former college teammate have united to make their dreams come true.

Mark Haugejorde is the chairman of Tepetonka, a 228-acre, private golf destination two hours west of the Twin Cities, which is set to break ground this year. Having signed the design firm of OCM Golf – consisting of PGA Tour pro Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Meade – to its first original U.S. design, Haugejorde announced Tuesday that esteemed CBS Sports broadcaster Jim Nantz will serve as a design consultant on the creation of The Prox, the club’s short course.

“I’ve always had this dream if I wasn’t a broadcaster, I think the most fun thing to be a part of is to shape the Earth and be in golf course architecture,” Nantz said during “The Five Clubs” podcast with host Gary Williams, course architect Gil Hanse and ESPN college basketball analyst and avid golfer Jay Bilas on March 1.

Haugejorde happened to be listening to the podcast one day in his office as his old teammate from their days playing on the golf team at the University of Houston shared his dream to leave his mark on the Earth, and Nantz’s words stopped him in his track.

“What did he just say?” Haugejorde recalled. “It hit me right away. Jim was always going to be involved as a founding member, but I had this idea that he could have an even bigger role.”

Jim Nantz, center, poses with Mike Schultz, left, and Mark Haugejorde of Tepetonka Club at Oak Hill during the 2023 PGA Championship. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

Nantz’s previous design work is limited to the replica hole of the iconic par-3 seventh hole at Pebble Beach that he designed in his backyard not far from the real thing.

“I’m not trying to compare that with something as important as what the OCM guys are going to do, but I’ve really truly dreamt of this,” Nantz told Golfweek. “I can’t wait to put on the mud boots and go out and talk it through with these guys. I know my role here, the OCM team, they’re geniuses. I can’t wait to just to learn from them and get to throw in one little suggestion – ‘Move this over here.’”

“Having had the opportunity to spend some time with Jim recently, it became apparent that he has a keen interest in golf course design and specifically in short courses,” said OCM’s Cocking. “The Prox will be integrated into Tepetonka’s practice facility, and we’re looking forward to working with Jim on the design. His input and experience will be invaluable in what we’re creating.”

Haugejorde, who once served as general manager of Jack Nicklaus International, is following in the footsteps of his father, who during a stint in the military was asked to build a golf course for the officer’s club in Japan in 1947. Later, his father spearheaded efforts to build Little Crow Country Club (now a 27-hole facility known as Little Crow Resort), a public course in West Central Minnesota. Haugejorde picked up the game there and won the 1973 high school state championship not far from the land near New London, Minnesota, where he used to go pheasant hunting as a kid and purchased to become the future home of his dream course, Tepetonka. The origin of the club’s name stems from a visit to the local historical society by Haugejorde’s intern, who found an article detailing that there had been a Tepetonka Hotel nearby on Green Lake, one of the state’s beautiful bodies of water.

“The article said that people would come from neighboring states to enjoy the clean water and great fishing. I thought they’re coming from neighboring states to come enjoy the great golf,” Haugejorde said. “Tepetonka stands for big house, and the brand is really taking off.”

Haugejorde took a similar leap of faith in signing OCM as his design team. Ogilvy came highly recommended by Gregg Tryhus, the owner of Grayhawk Development and the visionary behind Whisper Rock, a 36-hole private facility in north Scottsdale, Arizona, where Ogilvy is a member. One of Minnesota’s favorite golfing sons Tim Herron also seconded the suggestion. Haugejorde did his due diligence, checking the firm’s work at Shady Oaks in Fort Worth, Texas, but again it was a podcast that played a pivotal role in his decision. Driving across Florida to meet with his first two members, Haugejorde listened to an interview with Cocking.

“I swear, if it’s possible, he was talking to me,” Haugejorde said.

Australian-based OCM, which is also doing a dramatic renovation of Medinah No. 3 near Chicago, was hired to design Tepetonka even though they’d neither met Haugejorde in person nor walked the property where the course will be built due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and only had seen drone footage.

A map of the course routing of Tepetonka, a private destination golf course being built west of Minneapolis by the design firm OCM. (Courtesy Tepetonka)

Tepetonka is Minnesota’s first entry into the private golf destination category, despite the state being renowned the world over for hosting events at historic venues. Haugejorde said the club would include lodging and a supper club. Douglas Fredrikson Architects has been selected to design the clubhouse and other buildings. Mike Schultz, who served as the longtime pro at Hazeltine National (1976-2012), including one summer when Haugejorde worked for him during college, will be the director of golf emeritus.

Tepetonka’s business model is designed for 20 founding members and 100 memberships in all. Play will be limited to a maximum of 90 players per day.

“It’s fractional ownership like NetJets, where you own a piece of the plane, here you own a piece of the golf course,” he said. “There are no dues. Instead you pre-purchase your golf days, everyone agrees to buy so much access for the golf course. So, everybody’s got the same amount, and it’s never crowded. We’ve got lodging and a supper club and it’s your course to come out and have as much fun as you want.”

He added: “The goal for each member or guest’s day is summed up in the phrase: ‘Can’t wait to get there – hate to leave!’ ”

Nantz is scheduled to get his boots muddy with OCM in August and will be back early in the NFL season when the Minnesota Vikings host the Kansas City Chiefs. Construction is set to commence in October, and the course, which is set to be a par 70 measuring 6,765 yards from the tips, is scheduled to open in the summer of 2025.

“I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Mark Haugejorde for over 40 years, and Tepetonka is his life’s calling,” Nantz said. “I think it’s going to be legendary. Minnesota is a golf-crazed state, and this is going to be a showcase course for Minnesota and America.”

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