PHILADELPHIA — The City of Brotherly Love is pound-for-pound one of America best golf towns. Maybe the best, with architectural gems everywhere you look.
Recently, though, one of its municipal crown jewels disappeared.
Cobbs Creek Golf Course was built in response to the city’s private-club-heavy scene. It opened in 1916 and welcomed all, regardless of race, gender or socio-economic background. The course became known as the “great uniter,” where white and black golfers could enjoy the game together. It’s where Charlie Sifford, who broke the PGA Tour’s color barrier, learned the game.
But over the years Cobbs Creek fell into disrepair, as time and neglect got the better of the place. Cobbs Creek shuttered in 2020, but it is starting to re-emerge thanks to the imagination of the Cobbs Creek Foundation and support from around the golf world, including Tiger Woods.
The Cobbs Creek renovation project will include two phases. The first phase will see the construction of a two-story driving range, restaurant, nine-hole short course, creek restoration and a TGR Learning Lab, the second of its kind from the Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation; in phase two, the golf course will come to life.
Helping restore Cobbs to its former glory is a project close to Woods’ heart. He viewed Sifford as a grandfather and named his son Charlie after the golfing trailblazer.
On Monday, in West Philadelphia, at the place where Sifford used to spend hours learning the game, Woods officially cut the ribbon on the TGR Learning Lab, where more than 4,500 local students will receive year-round Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education, design labs, support staff and college readiness programs. There are 3D printers, a math lab and, of course, a golf simulator.
The golf course will come next, but Monday was an important step in the reimagining of Cobbs Creek and a reminder that golf can be a pathway to opportunities if everyone is allowed to walk down it.
“This has been an incredible journey for me, my family and my entire foundation,” Woods said Monday. “Cobbs Creek, it has already been said, was a home for Charlie Sifford, who didn’t quite have the access to play other places around the country, but he called this home. Ironically enough, he became a grandfather that I never had. If I was within six shots of the lead going into every tournament, he used to send a tele-text and it would be on my locker and it would say, ‘Go kick their [blank].’ So that’s the Charlie that I knew and that I grew up with.
“So coming here to a place that he played, he grew, he called home, and for me to have the support of the entire community to build a home, a safe place, innovative. A place where all children should be able to have access to that they don’t and now they do. I didn’t start the foundation to produce golfers that hit golf balls. I started the foundation to produce the greatest humans possible. In order to do that, you have to have a place that is tangible. Something that they can call theirs, something that they can feel and is theirs. It’s their home. We provide the programs and the materials for them, but more importantly, it’s a safe place where they can learn and grow and be amongst others that they probably wouldn’t have met in the first place.”
In all, the Cobbs Creek restoration project cost $150 million. With help from the private and public sectors, including money from the PGA Tour, Woods and a $250,000 grant from the Jordan Spieth Foundation, Cobbs Creek is starting to re-emerge from dormancy. When all is said and done, there will be 27 holes designed by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, along with the short nine-hole course by the TGR Learning Lab. The project is slated to be finished by 2027.
The goal, should it all come to fruition, is to have Cobbs Creek be a fully self-sustaining non-profit that provides residents with an affordable place to play golf while giving youth in the area a place where they can build toward their future, on or off the course. The vision also includes the potential of bringing a PGA Tour event to Cobbs Creek.
The vision is to bring Cobbs Creek back to life and ensure it never fades away again.
“It was a place of opportunity for all people, not just here in the great city of Philadelphia or in the region, but far beyond,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said Monday. “It was a destination. This was a place people wanted to be.
“Tiger, thank you for appreciating and recognizing the important history that exists here at Cobbs Creek. I want to say thank you for believing in Philly and the promise of all of our young people. … This isn’t just going to be a place where someone is going to pick up a stick and hit the ball a hell of a lot better than I could hit it. This is, even more importantly, a place where young people are going to walk in that lab and their eyes are going to be open to something they wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to see. That they otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to experience.”
Monday wasn’t about golf for Tiger Woods. There were no questions about his recovery, his role on PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp’s new committee or the Ryder Cup. Although he did post a swing video on Tuesday to show his progress in rehabbing from the March surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles:
No, Monday was all about the great re-imagining of Cobbs Creek, and a golf restoration project that could have far-reaching implications across the country should its non-profit model to pair municipal golf and STEM education prove successful. It’s a vision that hopes to resurrect a municipally-run shining star that once represented more than a place to hit balls — and ensure it realizes its promise.
“We’re just getting started,” Woods said.
