Why Homeowners Turned Down $1 Million From the Golf Club Hosting the Masters
Why Homeowners Turned Down Million From the Golf Club Hosting the Masters
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Some people spend their lives quixotically dreaming of playing in professional golf’s Super Bowl, the Masters Tournament. Others spend big bucks just to attend the annual event held at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, one of the most exclusive (and exclusionary) private clubs in the U.S.
And yet there’s at least one couple that feels perfectly comfortable rejecting the revered institution—even when its reps come up with $1 million.
Herman and Elizabeth Thacker are throwing a wrench into the Augusta’s growth plans by refusing to sell their modest brick home to the place so the club can expand a parking lot, according to NJ.com. (The 2016 Masters Golf Tournament is underway April 7–10.)
The club has shelled out more than $40 million to buy the other homes in the Thackers’ neighborhood in order to pave over the properties to build the free parking lot, according to NJ.com. One of them was the Thackers’ other home, across the street, which they sold to the club for $1.2 million, according to NJ.com. Homes in this Southern town have a median price of $119,900, according to realtor.com®.
But with their current home, they don’t seem willing to budge. “Money ain’t everything,” Herman Thacker told NJ.com.
The Thackers built the three-bedroom home in 1959 and raised their two children in it. And they certainly aren’t anti-golf: Their grandson Scott Brown is now a player on the PGA Tour, attempting to qualify for the Masters.
Their refusal to sell hasn’t discouraged a representative from the club stopping by to chat.
“He’ll come by here every so often, and he’ll say, ‘Just want to let you know we’re still interested in your property,’” Herman Thacker told NJ.com. “And we’ll tell him the same thing again.”
The only other home left in the parking lot is owned by Mary Ann Richards, according to ABC affiliate News Channel 6. The 89-year-old widow raised her 10 children in the four-bedroom house.
The family doesn’t want to move their elderly mother from her longtime home, Richards’ daughter Mary Lynn Logan, 52, told realtor.com. Logan, along with her husband and daughter, moved back into the house three years ago to take care of her mother.
The golf club has been very “understanding” of their situation, Logan says. “They don’t come and hound us,” she says.
Developers don’t start off with their highest offers, as it’s a sometimes lengthy negotiation process, says Debbie Becher, a sociology professor at Columbia University.
But offers aren’t typically indefinite, says Becher, also the author of “Private Property and Public Power: Eminent Domain in Philadelphia.” If a deal isn’t reached, “at some point [developers] walk away,” she says.
She’s doubtful that the golf club will turn to eminent domain to force them out in a last-ditch effort to get the land.
“Most properties taken are ones that someone has abandoned, so there is no protest,” Becher says. “Politicians have much more reason to be careful with eminent domain if the public knows it’s driven by a developer.”
If all this sounds a bit familiar, you might just be remembering a rather nasty dust-up a few years ago between the current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, and a group of Scottish residents who didn’t warm up to the idea of vacating their historic homes to make way for the then-“Celebrity Apprentice” star’s planned resort and golf club.
The documentary “You’ve Been Trumped” covered Trump’s efforts to get a group of Scottish homeowners, including a 90-year-old woman and part-time fisherman Michael Forbes, to sell their properties so he could put up his $1.5 billion golf resort along the coastline.
At one point Trump offered Forbes £450,000 (or $635,760) and an annual salary of £50,000 (or $70,640) for an unspecified job, according to The Guardian. But Forbes stayed the course. He told a local newspaper that even for 10 million pounds, Trump could “shove it.”
Forbes, whom Trump called a “loser” on Twitter, was voted the country’s Top Scot in 2012 for his fight against the real estate mogul in whisky distiller William Grant & Sons’ Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards.
In response, Trump banned the distiller’s products at his properties and called for a global boycott of the company, according to Scotsman.com.
The Trump International Golf Links still opened in 2012.
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