DATE: Wednesday, June 4, 1997               TAG: 9706040653

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C4   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JIM DUCIBELLA, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   50 lines

BEACH TPC COURSE MAY BE SET FOR AUGUST '98 PLAY

The PGA Tour plans to break ground on its newest Tournament Players Club course - the $10 million TPC-Virginia Beach - in early August and it could open for play by August, 1998.

``It should take between 12 and 18 months for construction,'' PGA Tour vice-president for golf-course development Keith Tomlinson told city council Tuesday morning during a 15-minute briefing. ``And that includes soup to nuts - clubhouse, golf course, practice range, chipping area, putting green, everything.''

The PGA Tour also is reviewing the possibilities of staging a Nike Tour event at the course, which constitutes a major part of the Lake Ridge project. One possibility is to hold the event the week after the May Nike stop outside Richmond.

If the Nike Tour comes here, the event would be the only one of 28 Nike tournaments held at a TPC course. Of the 15 TPC courses nationwide, nine host PGA Tour events and three Senior events.

Neither a project architect nor consultant have been hired yet for what will be a daily fee (public) course, Tomlinson said. Among the prime candidates for the consulting job is Virginia Beach native and two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange, the touring pro at Kingsmill in Williamsburg.

Although it has not yet been determined what style course will be built - stadium, links or some combination of the two - Tomlinson estimates that at least 600,000 yards of earth will be moved and shaped to create a rolling, hilly championship course out of what once was a bean field and nursery.

``The soil is tremendous; there's lots of sand,'' Tomlinson said. ``That lends itself well to getting good material to use.''

Tomlinson, a William and Mary graduate, joked that he had special incentive to see that TPC-Virginia Beach received his every attention.

``With (PGA Tour commissioner) Tim Finchem being a graduate of Princess Anne, he asks me frequently how things are going with the Virginia Beach project,'' Tomlinson said. ``I'm pleased to tell him, honestly, how well things are progressing. . . . It's coming together nicely.''

The TPC network encompasses 15 courses in 10 states. The closest TPC course to Virginia Beach is TPC at Avenel in Potomac, Md., where this week's Kemper Open is being staged. Tomlinson said his division sifted through about 50 proposals from cities and private developers before selecting the ``three or four'' sites on which to build. Other TPC courses currently either under construction or in the planning stages are TPC at Jasna Polana in Princeton, N.J.; TPC at Sugarloaf in Atlanta; and TPC at The Canyons in Las Vegas.

``We're very selective about where we build,'' Tomlinson said. ``We don't want there to be hundreds of TPC courses. If we could put one in every state, we'd be happy.''

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