CHARLOTTE — I am riding on a golf cart next to Quail Hollow Club president Johnny Harris, but “flying” may be the more operative word, because it feels like not all four of our wheels are touching the ground.
There is so much to do at Quail Hollow in the final days before the Presidents Cup begins, and so much to see in the gleaming miniature city being constructed around the golf course, that Harris has literally sped up the process.
I murmur something about the pristine 2,500-seat horseshoe stadium that has somehow arisen around the first tee.
“You ain’t seen anything yet,” Harris said, flooring it. “Hang on, podnah.”
As I think back nostalgically to sedate rides I’ve taken in golf carts driven by grandmothers and 11-year-olds, a thought strikes me.
“You took the governor off of this golf cart, didn’t you?” I say as Harris rockets down the driving range.
“I did!” Harris says, chortling. “And now Jimmie Johnson is always trying to get hold of it!”
Harris will occasionally exaggerate for effect, and this seems like an exaggeration. A seven-time NASCAR champion who can drive anything he wants to, searching for one particularly fast golf cart?
A couple of days later, I text Johnson — a Quail Hollow member — about his supposed quest for Harris’ golf cart.
“It is true,” Johnson texts back. “And I’ve had limited success locating the cart for my use.”
Harris’ souped-up golf cart — minus the governor, which is supposed to limit a cart’s speed — isn’t a bad analogy for all that’s been going on at Quail Hollow. On Thursday, the 2022 Presidents Cup starts there, pitting 12 American golfers vs. 12 International golfers in a team event that will be heavy on American flags and “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants.
The whole golf course is souped-up, with 650,000-700,000 square feet of hospitality tents and the like surrounding it on all sides. By comparison, the 2017 PGA Championship at Quail Hollow had 450,000 square feet of “raised floor,” as Harris calls it, and an average Wells Fargo PGA Tour tournament has 340,000.
The event will require a few mental gymnastics for golf fans who have attended other pro tournaments at Quail Hollow, a 63-year-old private club in south Charlotte with a membership of about 340.
The Presidents Cup is a different beast. It’s a biennial event conducted in a team match-play format, with most of the matches never getting to the 18th hole. That’s why “The Green Mile” — Quail Hollow’s well-known finishing stretch of holes 16, 17 and 18 — has been transformed to holes 13, 14 and 15 for the Presidents Cup only.
Holes 1-8 are the same, but after that, follow the signage and pay attention. The idea is to make sure Quail Hollow’s best and most difficult holes have an effect on the outcome.
“When you get into match play, it’s pretty spectacular,” Harris said. That’s a word he uses a lot. The garrulous 75-year-old real-estate developer lives for the spectacular.
“And then the actual matches themselves are like an organism moving around a track,” Harris said of the Presidents Cup. “They move through the golf course, and they move fairly quickly. If you go to one spot and stand still, you can see everybody in about an hour and 40 minutes. And then you’ve got to move and go jump in front of this organism.”
Trying to shock the world
Harris’ beloved course is used to transformation. It has hosted a number of big events over the decades and will host the Wells Fargo Championship once again in the spring of 2023 and 2024, and then its second major when the PGA Championship returns in 2025.
But the Presidents Cup is unique, with an unusual format that finishes with 12 match-play “singles” matches on Sunday. The U.S. is heavily favored and has gone 11-1-1 in the 13 previous Presidents Cup matches. The International team is composed of a dozen non-European players from all over the world (the Ryder Cup, which will be played next in 2023, showcases European players against the U.S.). But the International Presidents Cup team has zero players in the world top 10, compared to five for the U.S.
“There’s no doubt that it would be shocking the world, really, if we managed to pull this off,” Trevor Immelman, the International team captain, told The Charlotte Observer recently.
As for Quail Hollow Club, it will be surprising if it doesn’t pull this off — given the vast amount of experience it has had with big-time golf events. However, a few twists may be thrown in, given the event’s high profile and knack for attracting guests that may require extra security.
Teased Harris: “You have to assume that since it’s called the Presidents Cup, that you may have a few of those people come.” He wouldn’t say more about which former presidents — or current president — might visit Charlotte.
But certainly sports stars and golf enthusiasts like Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan, Johnson, former UNC basketball coach Roy Williams and others are expected to be there for at least part of the event, as well as musicians like Darius Rucker.
An Olympic feel
Speaking of music, the U.S. national anthem will be played before the first shot is struck, and the American players will be wearing various patriotic colors and/or flags each day. The whole thing will have something of an Olympic feel. Davis Love III, the U.S. captain and a former star golfer at UNC, also promises that a Carolina blue shirt will be part of the wardrobe for the U.S. on one of the four days of competition.
Not all of the golfers will be familiar names, particularly on the international team, where Immelman lost as many as four potential players to the Saudi-backed breakaway LIV Golf tour (the U.S. team wasn’t as directly affected).
But, as Love warns, everyone playing is a pro. And in team golf, especially, the vagaries of fate and camaraderie can have an outsized effect.
As for the crowds: somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 people are expected to be at Quail Hollow each day from Thursday through Sunday. Traffic and parking will be issues as always. With only 24 golfers at most on the course at any one time, sometimes it will be challenging to find the right viewing spot.
Quail Hollow was announced as the host of this Presidents Cup way back in 2015. The event was originally supposed to be played in 2021, but was delayed a year due to COVID. Quail Hollow landed one of the PGA Tour’s signature events in part, Harris said, because the club did the PGA Tour a favor once in moving the date of its yearly Wells Fargo golf tournament.
In return, Harris said, he asked for the Presidents Cup — not because he thought Quail Hollow would get it, but because his old mentor Arnold Palmer had told him: “Just be ready, when you come to bat, to take a swing.”
Back to the golf cart ride: Harris is arrowing through the course so speedily that he has time to show me the evidence of wildlife on the course: where two bald eagles live and fish, where the deer and coyotes roam, where a solitary bobcat comes out at night to forage.
Then comes the endless acreage of corporate hospitality, lined up in neat rows, ready for liquids to flow and business deals to be struck alongside 20-foot putts.
All of it makes Harris smile.
Big-time golf is coming to Charlotte once again.
“Spectacular,” Harris says, putting pedal to medal one more time on his cart, and we head toward home.
