Improvements include rebuilt hole, extended levee
Mirimichi, the place that superstar Justin Timberlake built and sold, reopens this weekend after an unusual winter for Memphis-area golf courses: It was closed to play for four months.
Having the course to themselves, crews accomplished tasks like rebuilding a hole, extending the flood-protecting levee system another 800 yards, trimming several hundred trees, and building a creek in front of a green.
“We completed many projects during the off-season and the course is better than ever,” said the new owner, Fred Edmaiston.
Mirimichi comprises 338 acres in the Woodstock community, halfway between Memphis and Millington.
Timberlake, who grew up in nearby Shelby Forest, bought the former Big Creek Golf Club in 2007, rebuilt it and re-opened the course as the publicly accessible Mirimichi in 2009.
Timberlake spent more money repairing and rebuilding after floods damaged Mirimichi in 2010 and 2011. The star had spent an estimated but unconfirmed $25 million on Mirimichi by the time he sold the course to Edmaiston Oct. 31, 2014, in an asset sale of $500,000.
Edmaiston has not revealed how much he paid additionally for Mirimichi’s equipment. He owns Aircon Corp., which makes air pollution control equipment.
Edmaiston closed the course for the winter on Dec.
17, saying there’s not enough cold-weather play to justify the expense of keeping the course open and that his crews would use the unfettered access to the holes to make improvements.
The workers rebuilt the redesigned No. 3, a par 3 hole. They replaced a vast waste bunker that fronted the green with a pond and elevated the tee box by more than six feet.
Those changes were made for both aesthetic and practical reasons, said Steve Conley, Mirimichi’s vice president for sales and marketing. The pond will help prevent the hole from flooding when big rains occur, he said.
In a related project, the crews also built an 800-yard long, six-foot-high levee along the side of the course that includes hole No. 3. The new levee separates the course from Caney Creek, a tributary to the larger Big Creek.
Timberlake had already raised by five feet the levee along Big Creek, which borders hole No. 2.
Drainage issues also motivated Edmaiston to extend a creek to front the par 4 No. 16, Conley said. The creek, which has long bordered the left side of the fairway, had emptied into underground pipes near the 16th green. But the pipes proved inadequate during big rains, which made the 16th hole too soggy, Conley said.
Crews dug a creek extension so that it meandered in front of the green and emptied into a lake behind the green.
The tree-trimming project makes the course’s large trees healthier and also promotes stronger growth of the grasses nearby by allowing more sunlight to reach the ground, said greens superintendent Dustin Green.