In addition to losing distance off the tee, I have found another byproduct of the aging process is not having as many heroes as I once did – or much interest in admiring people in that way. Maybe it’s the get-off-my-lawn cynicism that for better or worse is a part of getting old. Or a realization that few folks impress me to that degree any more.
None of that is to say, however, that I do not still have my exemplars. One such soul is Atlanta real estate mogul Tom Cousins, and I was saddened to learn last week that he had passed away, at age 93.
Cousins is best known for helping to fashion the modern skyline of Atlanta and developing the biggest and best real estate communities in the Georgia capital. But what put him in my personal hall of fame – and that of so many others – was how he saved the East Lake Golf Club where Bobby Jones learned to play the game as well as the East Lake neighborhood and then tried to make that revitalization model work throughout the country. He called it “golf with a purpose.”
Cousins initiated that effort in 1993, using a charitable foundation that he and his wife, Ann, led to rejuvenate what had become the baddest part of Atlanta.
First, they bought the historic East Lake Golf Club, which Cousins’ parents had joined during World War II and where amateur greats Jones, Charlie Yates and Alexa Stirling, had once teed it up. Then the Cousins clan started to restore its Donald Ross course and Tudor clubhouse.
They also looked at ways to turn around the blighted neighborhood that surrounded them. And as I discovered in a tour of the area that I took with Cousins in 1997, it was in bad shape. Crack houses with barred windows lined the streets, and stories abounded of golfers getting robbed on the course during rounds – and of people diving for cover whenever a car backfired out of fear of being shot.
Cousins also took me to a nearby housing project. Officially called East Lake Meadows, it was more widely known as Little Vietnam, for the gunfire that broke out there with alarming regularity.
Quite improbably, given how difficult it is to revive a place that was in such disrepair, Cousins effected great change at the club as well as in the general area, where houses have been rebuilt and repainted and once-overgrown lawns are now freshly mowed. So much so, in fact, that the PGA Tour began staging its annual Tour Championship at East Lake in 1998. Three years later, the USGA held the U.S. Amateur there.
As for Little Vietnam, which decades before had been the site of East Lake’s No. 2 golf course, it is now home to a thriving, mixed-income residential community as well as a charter school, a YMCA, an executive course named after Yates and a driving range and short-game practice facility that is also home to a First Tee chapter.
What makes the story even better is that in 2009, Cousins joined forces with billionaire investor Warren Buffett and the late hedge fund maestro Julian Robertson to create Purpose Built Communities and show other American neighborhoods in need how to replicate the East Lake success.
Maybe it was seeing East Lake at its worst and then watching the area evolve so splendidly through the years. Or spending time there with Cousins, a man so successful that Tom Wolfe modeled the main character in his best-selling novel “A Man in Full” after him – and so modest that Cousins seemed incapable of using the personal pronoun “I.” Or hearing others speak so glowingly of him, such as former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, who once told me: “There is no better human being than Tom Cousins.”
Sadly, Tom Cousins has gone on to his great reward.
But the reward he gave so many people during his very well-lived life will endure forever.
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John Steinbreder
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Top: The clubhouse at East Lake Golf Club
MIKE EHRMANN, GETTY IMAGES