The late Tom Weiskopf was never one to mince words inside the ropes and in the broadcast booth, or even when he was surveying land for a new golf course.
This was no ordinary land in the southwest corner of Utah — a 600-acre field of black lava amid red rock mountains about 30 miles from Zion National Park.
“We were walking the course and he picked up a rock and he handed it to me,” said Patrick Manning, the managing partner of Black Desert Resort. “He said, ‘Hey, Patrick, what’s this?’ I said, ‘It’s a rock.’ He said, ‘You’re correct, this is a rock.’
“But then he puts his arms out and he said, ‘This is a desert.’ And it became Black Desert at that point.”
It was the last championship golf course Weiskopf designed before he died in August 2022 of pancreatic cancer. His partner, Phil Smith, finished the project that has been depicted as a landscape where “Kona (Hawaii) meets Sedona (Arizona).”
The course is part of a $2 billion resort with an enormous convention center, seven restaurants, eventually 800 guest rooms — and now a PGA Tour event.