Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the beloved nine-hole course in rural Tennessee, faces a question familiar to punk-rock bands that hit commercial pay dirt: how to appeal to a growing market without compromising what made you popular in the first place?
It’s a fine line but Sweetens has been straddling it. Born in 2014 as a bootstrapping operation just west of Chattanooga, the course shed its underdog status soon enough. Instagram helped with that, flooding feeds with alluring posts from the game’s nascent influencer set. When, three years later, the New York Times rang in with feature coverage of the Rob Collins/Tad King design, Sweetens’ standing in the mainstream was firmly sealed. Never mind that golfers — and golf writers — continued to refer to it as a “cult favorite.” The course had become a juggernaut.
Today, Sweetens belongs to an ownership group that includes Peyton Manning, Andy Roddick and Reef Capital Partners, a prominent investment and real-estate development firm. It’s a burgeoning business. But its brass seems intent on staying true to the property’s original ethos, as recent expansion plans make clear…