Reporter

Sand Trap

In the desert hideout of Lajitas, a wealthy developer is spending more than $80 million to build a luxury golf course|resort. That may not be enough to protect him from the elements.

by John Spong

May 2002

The desert sports logo on the river guides’ truck was scarcely visible through the gathering dust as we crawled to the ghost town at Terlingua after a day trip to Mariscal Canyon. It’s a long drive even by Big Bend standards: two hours creeping over bone-dry washes, past ruins of sunbaked adobes that never had a chance, through a sea of scattered cactus, creosote bushes, and endless, merciless Texas. And that’s just to get to the paved road that is itself another hour from Terlingua. It’s a measure of the people who choose to live out here—and it is always a conscious choice—that not once on such a drive will you hear anyone ask, “Are we there yet?”

The three Desert Sports guides in the truck that January afternoon shared that mind-set. The de facto honcho was Jim Carrico, the former superintendent of Big Bend National Park generally regarded as having made the destination great. Jack Kinslow was along too, an Austin retailer who had decided to retire early and refuel in the ghost town instead of having a midlife crisis. Driving the truck was a small, wiry woman with a been-there, made-do-with-that manner who was identified only as Taz.

These folks don’t mind a three-hour drive because frequently enough it’s a trip like this one, from Mariscal’s sheer 1,500-foot limestone walls to the porch outside the storefronts of the ghost town, where each afternoon the community’s more refined element gathers to drink a cold beer and watch the sunset soak the western face of the Chisos. For locals, a long drive is like the months with no rain or the summer days when the thermometer hits 100 well before the clock strikes noon. It’s simply what a West Texas sunset costs.

But while peace of mind might shoo away such pedestrian concerns as the time of day, that security is suddenly looking tenuous. Part of the desert rat’s repose is knowing that people who don’t love the desert don’t come out here, but the real world is creeping closer than was ever thought possible. So the discussion in the truck turned, as does every conversation in West Texas these days, to Steve Smith and his plan to create the Southwest’s most exclusive golf resort twelve miles west, in Lajitas.

Smith might be one of the few people ever to visit Big Bend and think it did not look enough like Lakeway. He was a savior when he bought the ramshackle resort two years ago, keeping the third leg of the Study Butte-Terlingua-Lajitas puebloplex (population: 300) from falling into the hands of a California hotelier. But then his construction site grew to look like war-torn Afghanistan, with great plumes of dust rising over the desolate hills. Rumors reached Final Conflict proportions: He was building a new runway for Southwest Airlines, a casino across the river, and horror of horrors, cell phone towers. When the unofficial mayor of Lajitas, a beer-drinking goat named Clay Henry, became the unlucky recipient of a back-alley castration last November, the scuttlebutt was that an irate local had nailed the bloody cojones to the clubhouse door at the golf course as a message to Smith. An alternative explanation had Smith emasculating the goat to send out a message of his own. None of these stories were true, but Smith was moving too fast to dispel them. Since the Desert Sports folks knew I’d spent the previous day with Smith, they wanted to hear the truth. It was just as amazing.

Smith and company are spending like the Clampetts: $40 million to date, $40 million more this year, all in cash dollars. They are building two eighteen-hole golf courses, a 25,000-square-foot clubhouse, and a 32,000-square-foot spa. An outdoor amphitheater that can seat three thousand people is already finished, and a world-class restaurant that will spotlight desert game is almost done. Smith plans seven hundred homes, the high end on two-acre lots that will sell for $1 million a piece.

“Who’s going to spend all that money to build in the desert?” asked Carrico.

“I asked Smith’s adman that,” I replied. “He’s Tim McClure, the M in GSD&M. He says, ‘All it’s going to take is one person with major league Hollywood credentials or major league sports credentials, and it’ll all be over. If Tom Cruise or Tiger Woods goes out there and plays golf, he’ll fall in love with the place, and it’ll all be over.’”

Taz shook her head as the truck pitched forward. Carrico kept firing away like he was working on a bucket of range balls, something he admittedly had never felt the urge to do. “Did he say whether people with major league credentials would mind living across the highway from an RV park?”

“He says there is no more RV park. The first thing he told Smith was, ‘Steve, you don’t have an RV park. You have Maverick Ranch.’”

“Maverick Ranch?”

“Yeah. He says the people who will buy slips in that park aren’t like the rest of us. They’re ‘mavericks,’ spending their twilight years crisscrossing the country in half-a-million-dollar motor homes, just playing golf and living.”

“And the slips are supposed to cost $100,000 a piece?”

“To start. They’ll end up as high as $175,000.”

And that’s just the beginning. Maverick Ranch will have a pond stocked for fishing. There’s talk of a small recording studio and plans to honor the mayor—who recovered from his unelective surgery, by the way—by selling Clay Henry Bock beer. The restaurant will sell a line of sauces and dressings, and the spa will market its own beauty and skin-care products made from native plants.

That was all Taz could take. Keeping one hand on the wheel and one foot on the gas, she turned all the way around to face me. It was of no concern that she wasn’t watching the road; there’s not much to run into in the desert. But there was a crazed look in her eyes.

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked. “Lajitas mud packs made with real Rio Grande mud? Are they absolutely nuts?”

“Careful, Taz,” I said. “McClure’s in love with this project. He said, ‘If I had the money, I’d go out there and buy Terling-you-a.’”

She looked like she was going to come over the seat and get me. “He called it ‘Terling-you-a’?”

“SOME PEOPLE SAY THIS IS JUST going to be a second ghost town,” Smith said the previous afternoon on the patio of his home. “They say, ‘Smith’s going to build this party, and nobody’s going to come.’ What will happen if they’re right? I kind of tongue-in-cheek tell them, ‘Well, at least me and my friends will have a really nice golf course to play.’”

He was overlooking the resort, watching his dream come together, the grass trying to green on the course, the bulldozers and the backhoes making room for the spa and clubhouse. Here stood Smith as plaid-and-khaki land baron, short and stout, with a patrón’s gray mustache and a dream to turn the desert into a billionaire’s playground. But as he lazily pulled a mouthful of vodka from a tall glass of Grey Goose and ice, he gazed out over his empire with a distinct, look-where-I’ve-landed wonderment.

The Legend of Steve Smith has him selling strings of dried chile peppers by the highway outside Austin in the mid-eighties. During the months when profits didn’t keep pace with bills, his wife, Sarah, would sneak their two kids into public swimming pools at night to bathe them. By the mid-nineties he’d amassed a fortune of nearly $1 billion, all by dint of a winning personality and a multilevel marketing plan. The company he helped build, Excel Communications, sold long-distance service, but the moneymaker was Smith’s Amway-style sales model, a pyramid and a product. It was one of the fastest companies ever to reach $1 billion in annual sales, and at its peak, the top sales rep made more than $1.5 million a month. Smith got a cut of every transaction.

He purchased Lajitas on a whim in February 2000. He had seen an ad for the auction of the resort—a nine-hole golf course, hotel, Old West boardwalk, and RV park on 22,000 acres—in Millionaire magazine and decided on the morning of the sale to make an appearance. Forty-five minutes before the auction opened in the Lajitas saloon, he arrived by helicopter and took a seat in a tall wing chair at the front of the room that prevented the spectators from seeing his face. He outbid a San Francisco hotel magnate for a sale price of $4.25 million and, to the further relief of the locals, promised that very little would change.

Sometime thereafter he developed his vision. “When I bought this place, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do,” he said. “I thought I’d dress the existing nine-hole course up a bit, so I got a golf course designer out here. By the time he was through working me over, we had a whole new championship course with wall-to-wall Bermuda and then a whole other course to go with it.”

Later that summer, he decided he needed another attraction. “I thought that if we built a little spa here, it could be a family affair,” he said. “There’d be a spa for the ladies and a pool for the kids, while the guys all played golf.” Again, consultants reimagined his modest spa and clubhouse as the palaces now under construction.

Pages: 1 2  next »