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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.