Sadly, Tiger Woods has been in the news the past 15 years as much or more for injuries and personal issues as golf, but 30 years ago, he represented a coming storm.
As Woods descended on the Honors Course in Ooltewah for the May 29 to June 1, 1996, NCAA championship tournament, he was a rising star, a force who would dominate and change his sport for the next decade-plus.
The arrival of Woods at the Honors Course brought together one of the great amateur champions of all time with a course meant to test amateur golfers of that caliber.
The Honors Course was founded by a Jack Lupton-led group of partners and opened July 2, 1983, according to a history on the course’s website. By 1996, the Honors had already hosted a collection of prestigious amateur tournaments, including the 1991 U.S. Amateur Championship.
Chattanooga Times Free Press staff writer Bob Gary covered golf for the Chattanooga Free Press, then the city’s afternoon newspaper, in the 1980s and ’90s. He said Lupton “wanted to celebrate the best of amateur golf, and the way he did that was to build the Honors Course. He built it very intentionally to host the highest caliber amateur championships. And they did that.