OCTOBER 18, 2019 – As a guy who’s golfed only 36 holes his entire life, I’ve sure spent a lot of time on golf courses.
During middle school, our cross-country running workouts and meets took place exclusively on golf courses.
The summer between college and law school, I worked nights at a municipal golf course, moving 18 sprinklers every hour. One round took an hour, so I was constantly on the move. Bugs were among the hazards. By the end of my nightly shift, my ski goggles were nearly opaque with layered bug carcasses.
Nowadays, every day, I hike or ski all over “Little Switzerland,” which in reality is a golf course.
Among my OCD behaviors—collecting golf balls (see my 9/23/19 post, “Did He, or Didn’t He?”).
But my most notable golf-course connections reside in the law department.
In 1988 a nationally recognized golf club (“Renowned Club”) retained me to examine an interesting legal problem with serious practical implications.
Renowned Club was preparing to host a national tournament. For staging purposes, the club had to control the largely undeveloped land that surrounded its championship golf course proper. A large portion of this adjacent land was subject to an option agreement, executed many years before, between the founders of Renowned Club and a developer. The option provided that “If a golf course is not developed on the land before October 1, 1989,” the developer could buy the land for chicken feed. The contract didn’t say “chicken feed,” but that was the figurative equivalent of the price. By 1988, the value of the land had skyrocketed.
For some months before Renowned Club came to me, it had tried to negotiate its way out of what was for them, an unfavorable option contract. When negotiations failed, Renowned Club asked me to devise and pursue a legal basis for defeating the developer’s option altogether.
We then went to war. For the next year, the case occupied the majority of my professional hours. I tried a number of arcane theories, but ultimately, the case came down to the interpretation of the clause I quoted above; the meaning of the words, “a golf course.” What had the contracting parties—the developer on the one side, Renowned Club on the other—meant? A mini-golf course? A putting green? A three-hole executive course? A par-three bare minimum golf course? Or, as the developer claimed, a top-flight, championship golf course—one costing millions, rendering impossible the club’s ability to defeat the developer’s rights under the option agreement?
We wrangled right through a week-long court (non-jury) trial at the end of which the poor judge announced, “I can’t decide! Lawyers, please try one more time to get your clients to settle before I have to rule!”
Stay tuned for round two–and a hole in one!
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
