Enter the Sand Trap
At the very end of 2016, it emerged in a public email dump that Rahm Emanuel and Mike Kelly, the superintendent of the Chicago Park District, had orchestrated a secret push to consolidate the Jackson Park and South Shore Golf Courses into a larger, single links—“the strongest urban golf site the PGA Tour has seen in 25 years,” as Kelly put it. After some cajoling from Barack Obama, Tiger Woods committed to designing the now-eponymous course. (A sopping Tribune lede, written just before Rahm’s emails were released, recounted Tiger plaintively asking where all the kids were during his dozen-cart tour of the existing courses.)
The planned course serves no significant purpose and was, by all indications, largely unasked for. (Though Kelly did write “that the community should initiate the request”—his request, that is—“to improve the golf courses.”) And now, Chicago golf journalist Bill Daniels has written an article for SwingU Clubhouse detailing some of the many obstacles still standing in its way. To sum up: the estimated cost has doubled to $60 million, meaning the CPD may not approve the plan after all; influential local organizations like Friends of the Park and Openlands are generally opposed to it; the proposal hasn’t gone through any environmental or structural review processes. There’s also, of course, going to be a new mayor, one possibly less inclined to puttering around with vanity projects. If the course falls through, that’s unfortunate for Emanuel, Woods, and Obama, but the rest of Chicago will carry on just as we have with the existing golf courses: perfectly fine.