Neighboring states have followed Alabama's example and have turned to golf to make money and, more importantly, a good name for themselves.

By Kevin Robbins

Not since a Yankee named Pratt built a cotton gin on Autauga Creek before the War Between the States has there been this much anticipation over a piece of central Alabama land known more for its billy goats than its golf. Late last year, timber trucks rolled. Old men coaxing channel cats from Cooters Pond watched heavy equipment roam the red earth. On 1,500 acres of fallow farmland and deer-tracked lowlands and hardwoods draped with Spanish moss, ruts in the clay defined the next 54 holes of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.

This year, Prattville becomes the eighth stop on Alabama's top draw for tourists with golf clubs in their trunks and bills in their wallets. Fifteen minutes north of Montgomery, the town of 24,000 anted one-quarter of the $22.5 million required to buy and develop land, raise a clubhouse, sink water lines, bury sewer pipes, pave roads, dig a 400-yard-wide practice range and sculpt three 18-hole courses for neither the timid nor the frail. All within a year.

"This," says Prattville mayor David Whetstone, "was an uphill project from day one."

But exhilarating at the top. The Prattville Area Chamber of Commerce plans to greet 40,000 new visitors a year, and the city expects business and residential development to hatch like tadpoles in shallow water. Their hopes seem reasonable. Other Alabama cities and towns gush about what the trail has brought to their diners and motels, not to mention Alabama's image as a golf state, where the participation rate (44th lowest in the nation) hangs at five to nine percent, as it does in Mississippi (49th) and Tennessee (43rd).

But what of its broader reputation? How have the 1.8 million rounds played on the trail since 1992 changed the way people define Alabama? Not much, unless you consider that people from all over the globe are renting cars, hotel rooms and golf carts in a state that a decade ago was a little more than a stop-and-stretch for travelers on their way to Florida for vacation.

Invented in the Carolinas, perfected in Alabama and replicated in other states in the South, the concept of packaging and marketing courses as destinations is changing a region of the U.S. that could use all the good spin it can get.

Six years after the Alabama trail surprised Southerners with 324 magnificent golf holes, neighboring states such as Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee are trying to make good with the same idea. That idea was to offer affordable golf on skillfully designed courses near interstate highways to folks unencumbered by membership at Augusta National, Old Waverly or Shoal Creek.

Trails transcend the game. They've given people a new reason to see the South. They show Southerners that state and local governments can improve their quality of life. And they help to erode the South's limited golf image as a retreat for the moneyed, where only wealth and social station grant the privilege of rolling putts on the finest greens around.

Golf trails "are a reflection of a greater economic and social awakening of the entire South," says Jim Hardy, whose firm developed and will manage four Jack Nicklaus-designed courses in Tennessee parks. "If the South isn't awakening, at least the rest of America is awakening to the South."

Scheduled to debut this year at Cumberland Mountain State Park near the Tennessee town of Crossville, The Bear Trace borrows liberally from the Alabama trail. The Tennessee General Assembly voted in 1993 to issue $20 million in bonds to build four courses and their identical, square-log clubhouses with open rafters and rustic stone fireplaces. Hardy's company, Golf Services Group, made more than 50 trips to Alabama during the evolution of The Bear Trace, which also includes sites at Chickasaw, Harrison Bay and Tims Ford state parks. "Alabama pioneered the concept of a trip across the state for public golfers," Hardy says. Tennessee followed confidently and learnedly along.

Like the Alabama trail, The Bear Trace plans to sell its courses as a single destination. There are other similarities. The Bear Trace will employ a central reservation starting-time system tied to a toll-free number. With the intent to tap national markets it will feature a Web site and a slick brochure. It will also offer something few Nicklaus courses can: a green fee of about $30.

The South likes to say that its storied hospitality seals the splendor of its golf trails, but what really makes them glitter is the price. Sunbelt Golf Corp., which manages the Alabama trail, charges $29 to $49 to walk a round at its courses, which include 54 stunning holes of golf known as Grand National in Auburn, home of the 1997 Nike Tour Championship and, this year, an LPGA event.

Trail courses charge less because they can. In Alabama, for example, heavy play and retail sales at one course can make up for light play and sales at another. And because the financial structure in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee is more public than private, trails are seen more as an investment in the common good, not as a strategy for quick dividends.

In Alabama, says one of the trail's founders, the project answered a question that crippled the state's ability to entice industry and economic development. "Was Alabama ever going to make an investment in itself?" asked David Bronner, a former law-school assistant dean who pledged $120 million in public employees' pension money to launch the project.

When Bronner, the CEO of Retirement Systems of Alabama, announced plans to finance 18 courses and hire Robert Trent Jones Sr. to supervise their design, some residents squawked. Bronner assured them it was a wise investment in the economic development of the state. "You have to be on radar screens to be considered," Bronner says. "Alabama wasn't on many radar screens."

Now it boasts a new Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa (1,500 employees) and has snagged a rocket factory (3,000) for Decatur. "It's like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," says Neal Wade, who leads the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama. Wade says his organization brags on the Alabama trail when luring industry. Each fall, he invites 35 or so international business leaders to Alabama for an expense-paid trip to play the trail and an oh-by-the-way pitch to set up shop in the state. Residential development bloomed, too. Houses fetching $200,000 and more surround the Silver Lakes site in eastern Alabama's Calhoun County. In Huntsville, a developer built 500 new homes and sold 1,000 lots on Hampton Cove. In Prattville, real-estate developers queue at meetings of the planning commission. "Our cup runneth over," says Julie Young, an executive assistant to the mayor.

Nothing of the sort will occur on the property adjacent to the courses in Mississippi. There, a band of state officials and lawmakers returned from a trip to Alabama's trail in 1992 with plans for courses in state parks, what later evolved into an abridged golf trail called The Magnolia Trace.

A 16-handicapper and Mississippi native named Charlie Williams was among those on the trip. It just so happened he also chaired the Ways and Means Committee in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Williams returned from Alabama aglow. Two years later, as part of a $52 million parks improvement package, the House voted to spend $10 million to create two privately managed courses developed by the state Department of Wildlife, Fisheries & Parks.

Unlike Alabama and Tennessee, Mississippi retained different course architects. An Arthur Hills course, Quail Hollow, opened in 1996 at Percy Quin State Park in the pine belt near McComb. A Bob Cupp design, Mallard Pointe, opened in October in John Kyle State Park south of Memphis near Sardis. In a state with a sandy, sun-dappled coast on the Gulf and the nation's third-largest casino market, additional courses are not unlikely.

For now, Mississippi hopes to share golf trailblazers with Alabama and Tennessee. "There's a certain synergy that surrounds golf courses: Golf begets more golf," says Williams. Remembering the 1992 trip to Alabama, Williams says trail officials encouraged neighboring Mississippi to join the fray. "They felt like if Mississippi was successful, that would bring more people to Alabama. Obviously, they convinced us that we would be able to ride their wave of success as well."

The town of Greenville, Ala., straddles Interstate 65 less than an hour south of Montgomery. It might as well be in another galaxy. A decade ago, the northwest side of the interstate was populated by precisely one gas station and one Bates House of Turkey restaurant, where families picked up a bird on their way to the beach. Then the trail came. Cambrian Ridge's 36 holes opened in 1994 on donated land. Golf magazines delivered high praise. Construction crews appeared suddenly. Two motels were built on the barren side of the interstate and another breaks ground this year. A Cracker Barrel arrived. So did cars bearing out-of-state license plates, carrying people and their golf clubs to a town they'd never heard of.

Mayor Ernie Smith says the interstate exit now is the second busiest on I-65 between Mobile and Huntsville. He keeps no formal traffic records. "All I do is go out there and look at the Wisconsin and Ohio and Tennessee tags, coming through town, playing golf." Less than 10 percent of the play at Cambrian Ridge comes from locals. Half of the players are from outside Alabama.

"We've turned Greenville into a destination," says Cambrian Ridge director of golf Kenny Szuch, whose duties include not only supervising teaching pros and staging youth clinics but rallying economic development and beckoning tourists. Directors of golf at all seven (soon to be eight) sites do the same. "We're literally trying to improve the quality of life in a state," Szuch says.

The NGA Hooters Tour literally listened. Late last year, officials from the mini-tour joined the mayor and other dignitaries in the Cambrian Ridge clubhouse to dine on hot wings, sip iced tea and announce that a tournament is coming this year to Greenville and its 10,000 citizens. The tournament will bring press, revenue and fleeting fame to the town. More subtle, and more meaningful, is the broader change a golf trail can exact on the image of the South.

For those who have never been, a four-wheeled drive through Dixie is an epiphany, golf or no. Gone are many painful relics of the Confederacy. The landscapes are sublime. There is more to Alabama than red dirt and timber trucks. There is more to Mississippi than cotton fields and shotgun shacks leaning low over Delta dust. Tennessee fairly shimmers, with its lakes and horse farms. The golf is pretty good, too. Even for the commoners. Especially so.

Daniel Pratt, an architect from New Hampshire, journeyed to central Alabama in 1832. He spied a place on Autauga Creek and built a gin there, and the town of Prattville was drawn into maps. All these years later, some folks looked at some land near Cooters Pond and wondered about a golf course there, and the eighth wonder of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail was drawn into blueprints. "You're getting ready to see a little community explode," says Bobby Vaughan, president and CEO for Sunbelt Golf.

"There has always been golf, but just for the limited few," says Williams of his beloved South. Acknowledging that a golf trail "isn't the answer to all of our problems," he adds quickly: "I do think it is a statement."

That statement? The South is different now. Y'all come see.