Plenty of golfers dream of rehabbing an aging local course, but George Jones might actually get the chance. When Jones began traveling to Tupelo, Mississippi, to visit his wife’s family, he discovered Bel Air Golf Course — a nine-hole municipal course dating back to the 1930s. After moving to Tupelo, a chance conversation with a local community leader kicked off a series of efforts that now include a King Collins routing and a dramatic plan to remodel the course. Now comes the hard part: raising the money to make this dream a reality.
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LYING FOUR: Tell me about Bel Air, because I don’t know anything about it.
GEORGE JONES: Most people don’t, honestly. Bel Air is the original Tupelo Country Club. So it’s right in the middle of town — great neighborhood, and built sometime around 1930. I believe it was built by a golfer out of Memphis — but like a lot of courses back then, a local pro laid out a track, and there you go. And like a lot of places in the 1960s and ‘70s, the club decided to move out of town for more land, so they could build an 18-hole course. When it moved, the City of Tupelo acquired the property, so it’s a city-owned golf course. A guy has the lease on the golf course, and the City lets him operate the golf course. So it’s a municipally owned, privately run, nine-hole golf course that has just been — I wouldn’t say neglected, but like a lot of municipal-owned places, it’s out of sight and out of mind: it’s maintained, but there hasn’t been any significant monetary investment into the course itself.
LYING FOUR: And as long as it’s being run under a lease, the operator doesn’t have much incentive to sink a ton of money into a place.
GEORGE JONES: Absolutely. But a golf course ages, like anything else. You’ve gotta put money into it, and nobody’s put any money into this in years. I’m a recent resident of Tupelo; I lived in Nashville for 18 years. My wife’s from here, and we decided a few years ago to move back. When I’d come visit her folks and wanted to play golf, I’d drive down to Old Waverly or occasionally go with a friend to the country club. But Bel Air was close and just a little nine-hole course that I could walk — it was great. And I didn’t exactly have my eyes on the property, but I thought, “Man, it would be so cool if somebody could do something with this golf course. It’d be a great asset for the City.” So I told a few people about that, even before I moved here. And once I moved here, I spoke to some friends, and they were supportive. And now a year and a half later, a lot of people agree this could be a great asset for the City. To get any kind of project like this going, you’ve got to have buy-in from a lot of different people — especially with a municipal project. It’s not like a property that’s privately owned, where one guy can just go dump a lot of money into it. But fortunately, Tupelo is a community that’s very forward-thinking in its investment in the city, and there are a lot of people in town who feel that way.
LYING FOUR: You’re really living the dream here. Probably 99 percent of golfers have an itty-bitty course near their house that they dream about turning into something really special, but nobody ever gets that ball rolling. How do you go from just a few guys talking about it into it being a real project?
GEORGE JONES: We’ve all sketched that golf course out on the back of a napkin. I’ve been doing that since I was 12 years old. I think some people don’t ever do it because it’s so big that they don’t know where to start. Part of it is getting the right people involved, and that meant getting the City involved; I don’t know how the municipal side of things works, and I don’t know the goings-on of the Tupelo business community. But my wife was at an Easter party for our 5-year-old, and I’m at home working, and she called me and said, “You need to come to this party and talk to Sam Pace.” And I was like, “OK, I have no clue who Sam Pace is.” And she said, “He’s the chairman of the Community Development Foundation, and he loves golf — and I mentioned something about Bel Air, and his ears perked up.” So I got in the car and drove over there five minutes later. Sam is all ears for anything that has to do with making the community better. And he’s also a golfer: he’s a founding member at Mossy Oak. So it started with an idea, but he was the guy who could actually get the ball rolling. So he calls a handful of guys in the community who are instrumental business owners — community development people, tourism people — and we all got in a room, and it started going from there.
The King Collins routing for a new nine-hole golf course in Tupelo, Mississippi.
LYING FOUR: At what point did you loop Rob and Tad in?
GEORGE JONES: I’ve mentioned this to Rob for years. Early on, when I first started thinking about this three or four years ago, I said, “Hey Rob, there’s this golf course down in Tupelo,” and Rob was like, “Well yeah, I’d love to do it.” Rob and I met in early 2016 out at Sweetens; I had taken a group, because I have a golf tournament business and I had heard rumors about it. I took a group of four to go check it out, and like everybody that played Sweetens in early 2016, we were the only four people on the golf course. I fell in love with the place. So I called Patrick and said, “How much does it cost to rent the golf course?” And they literally had never had anybody ask that question; Patrick was like, “I need to get back with you. I need to figure out what we’re gonna do.” So we ended up kind of striking up a relationship with Rob and taking a lot of groups up there. And Rob’s got a heart for Mississippi: he went to school at Mississippi State, and his wife is from here, so I think it made sense. I ended up taking a group of a lot of civic leaders up to Sweetens last fall, and we caught it on one of those perfect fall days: 75 degrees, and not a cloud in the sky. And as you know, the first time you go to Sweetens, your jaw drops and you’re just like, “Where am I?” It’s like being in Field of Dreams in Iowa. The guys fell in love with it; Rob was a great host. And I think once they saw it, they could see what this guy does. Sam Pace had a great quote: he said, “You know, George, an architect didn’t build this course. This was built by an artist.” And I love that description of Rob and Tad. And that’s not to diminish the architectural needs of building a golf course, but there’s so much artistry that goes into it. And when you get someone to Sweetens, it just wins them over.
LYING FOUR: I know Rob and Tad have routed something at Bel Air. What does that routing look like, especially compared to what’s out there right now?
GEORGE JONES: Rob and Tad have been down twice — once for an initial visit, and then right when the COVID-19 thing was just starting. The routing is not a rehab of the golf course, this is a new golf course. It uses a couple of the same corridors, but it’s basically a new golf course on that piece of property. It’s a nine-hole routing; we thought about a 12-hole routing, and we thought maybe we could get a 10th hole out of it, but nine holes is what it’s meant to be. That’s just kind of what it is. And then we’re looking to do a short-game area, kind of like a pitch-and-putt; that might be a couple of acres.
LYING FOUR: That sounds awesome.
GEORGE JONES: That’s part of selling a project like this: it has to appeal to a lot of people. One thing we’ve always said is that it’s gotta be affordable and accessible to everyone, and like everyone, we’re trying to see which way golf is moving. And I think that’s where it’s moving. We want it to be an asset not just for golfers, but for everyone in the community.
LYING FOUR: What are the next steps at this point?
GEORGE JONES: We’ve got the master plan, so now the next step is how are we gonna pay for this thing? We think it’s really important that it’s not just public or private money, but a combination of that. Tupelo has always been a very progressive town when it comes to parks and rec; we have a brand new natatorium here, where they just held the synchronized swimming national championship. It’s crazy. They’ve been really good about spending on their parks department, and we hope there’s an opportunity there to get some funds. That’s not finalized yet. And there’s interest privately as well. But it’s not a privately owned property, so you have to go through all the steps; eventually we’ll have to get approved by the city council and the mayor. The City had already committed funds to redo the community center at Bel Air, so we will break ground on the new building this year, and we’ve been working with them to make the new center’s location compatible with Rob and Tad’s master plan for the course.
LYING FOUR: Is there any sort of timeframe in place, or at this point is it just knocking the next thing off the to-do list?
GEORGE JONES: We’ve had conversations with city council members — including Markel Whittington, who is the city council member from the Bel Air district — and they’re very supportive of it and love that we’re going in this direction. I’m not the expert on that side of things, but I think we’ve got a good shot at it.
LYING FOUR: It would make so much sense. I love that part of the state, but there’s not enough great public golf there — at least not for the size of that area. I mean, Tupelo is a bigger town than people think.
GEORGE JONES: Absolutely. We’ve got 40,000 people here, but during the week there’s nearly a hundred thousand people in the town — and that’s all the little commuter towns coming into Tupelo to work. And there’s great industry here: the largest rural hospital in the country is here, and Toyota has a plant 15 minutes from here. Cooper Tires is based here; two really large banks are based here. So it’s a thriving town, and I think it surprises people when they get here. As a great example, Rob came here basically as a favor for me. I was like, “Look, I want you to come look at this place.” And obviously, he and Tad are much more in demand than they were even two years ago. But Tad told Rob, “Why the hell are you dragging me down to Tupelo, Mississippi? This is a waste of our time. Why are we going down here?” And Rob was like, “No, we gotta do it.” So they got here and spent a day in town, just kind of meeting people and driving around — and Tad told me, “It blew my perception of what Mississippi was.” And that’s what all of us who live here are fighting: this perception. A lot of it is definitely earned, but we’ve got to be progressive in our thinking about what we can do to make this place better, to attract people, and to keep people here. And I know a golf course plays a smaller role in that overall larger question, but I think it’s an important part. It’s important to show life and growth — that we’re not the Mississippi of old, and that we’re looking to do better.
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