Former GT Resort owner remembered

Jan. 26—ACME — Grand Traverse Resort and Spa is now a can't-miss feature in the Traverse City-area skyline, and former owner Paul Nine spurred many of the early projects that made it so.

Nine, who died on Jan. 14 at age 83, bought a nine-hole golf course and its club house in 1973, then turned it into a resort with a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, a conference center, a 16-story tower with condos and a restaurant, more condos elsewhere in the village — and the list goes on.

Nine owned the resort until it emerged from bankruptcy in 1993, according to the resort. The General Retirement System of the City of Detroit, its main lender, took over and brought in outside management before KSL Recreation Corporation bought the resort in 1997.

Glen Lile worked at the resort from 1983 to 1998 and remembered the owner well. He praised Nine as the best boss he ever had, and remembered him as personable and down to earth.

"Paul treated everybody just like they were equal to him all the way, he never thought he was any better than the people that worked in housekeeping, the people that washed dishes — any of them," he said.

Nine had a knack for bringing people and events up to the resort, from professional golfers to politicians, Lile said. The National Governor's Association conference was one such event.

Future President Bill Clinton chaired the association in 1987, the same year the 20,000-square-foot Governor's Hall opened, according to the resort. The association returned in 2007, about four years after the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians bought the resort.

Nine's legacy has lived on there since it opened in 1980, said Caroline Rizzo, Grand Traverse Resort and Spa's communications manager. Several current employees were hired under his leadership and were saddened to hear of his passing, and thought back on all the time, effort and interest Nine put into the resort.

"He focused on having great employees and taking care of them," she said in an email. "He gave a lot of time and attention to the resort and that is why it has been an iconic northern Michigan landmark for 40-plus years."

Nine knew how to find investors, putting just $92,625 of his own money into the resort as of 1985. That's when former Record-Eagle staff writers Rick Haglund and Matt Roush reported on how Nine networked his way to $11 million from 90 investors, including pro athletes and clients of his law firm.

"That was sort of his genius, is that he knew how to raise money, and to find loans and investors," Haglund said. "He was really quite good at that."

Haglund followed the resort's development before leaving in 1985 to report in Detroit for Booth Newspapers, he said. He would return to cover some of the high-level conferences hosted there, like automotive management briefing seminars.

Nine and wife Sue both came from modest backgrounds, with his father working long shifts on a General Motors assembly line, he told the Record-Eagle in 1985. He worked at both Chrysler and Ford while attending college, eventually earning a law degree. His debate squad at Wayne State University went to the national championship in 1962.

While Nine had relatively little cash into the project, he put in long days, as one former partner told the Record-Eagle. The president of one lender called Nine "the brightest developer I've met in my 15 years in this business."

Jim Maitland was Acme Township supervisor throughout much of the development, and remembered Nine as always being honest with the township on his intentions.

"I think he had a grand vision, he always was honest with the township," Maitland said. "He always did what he said he was going to do, and his problems weren't with the township, they were with the economy and business."

That vision started with a six-story, 250-room hotel, a pool and sports complex and additions to the former Sandtrap restaurant — now McGee's 72 and separately owned, records show. That hotel was completed in 1980, and the next year golfer Jack Nicklaus signed on to design "The Bear," the course that opened in 1984.

Building such a big development took lots of money, and by 1986 the company sought a $45.5 million loan after fending off earlier attempts to foreclose on its original Farmers Home Administration loan. The Detroit pension fund agreed to guarantee the loan, having already bought the $12.7 million FHA loan that year.

Haglund said those FHA loans at the time often went to resort projects that failed, and one of the resort's lenders, National Bank and Trust, went under in 1984. That made the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation the resort's lead lender for a time.

"The resorts are a pretty risky business, and obviously Traverse City was much smaller then than it is now," Haglund said. "It really took a while for the resort to take off, and there was a lot of financial losses in the early years, which ultimately caught up with Paul."

Nine told Mike Terrell for a Michigan Golfer article that the sport's increasing draw to the resort was no accident: Marketing was going to be the key, with golf as the vehicle.

That included tournaments like the Michigan Open in 1983 and the Ameritech Senior PGA tournament in 1989 — Lile recalled helping to install what might've been the region's first cell phone tower, albeit a temporary one, ahead of the latter.

Nicklaus' involvement brought a major shift in the region's sports scene, as former Record-Eagle Sports Editor Joe Conklin recalled. He worked at this paper from 1972 to 1982, and said high school sports dominated the athletics sphere then. Nicklaus and the late Arnold Palmer's designing "The Legend" course for Shanty Creek Resort near Bellaire changed that.

Conklin also remembered "The Bear's" reputation as a difficult course from covering the Senior PGA tournament for the Grand Rapids Press.

"I just remember a lot of the golfers were complaining that it was too hard, even the professional senior golfers," he said.

As often as Haglund interviewed Nine, he usually did so by phone, since the resort owner frequently worked from his law office in Bloomfield Hills. Some township residents didn't like a downstate developer running things from afar, or the resort in general.

Residents not only feared the resort's impact on Acme's small-town nature, but local farmers who struggled to get loans from the USDA also were angered that Nine could borrow more than $13 million from the FHA for a resort, Haglund said.

Past reports detailed concerns that the growing resort and its golf courses would have environmental impacts, including the erosion of the area's notoriously silty soil into nearby creeks.

Nine told Haglund and Roush that he enjoyed controversy in a sense, through his love of debate.

Occasionally tense interviews between reporter and owner didn't seem to stay with Nine when Haglund found his office near Detroit was in the same building as Nine's. Those past arguments never came up.

"He was just a smart guy, I got along with him pretty well for the most part," Haglund said.

Lile, now an East Bay Township trustee, recalled how Nine knew most people at the resort on a first-name basis, stopping to chat with him as he walked the halls with investors. Lile was also astonished to find that, along with a house in Williamsburg, Nine stayed in a normal room in the hotel, not one of the big suites.

He called him a visionary, one who came up with big plans and saw them through.

Haglund agreed the resort is a monument to Nine's efforts, noting it survived and grew during a national recession and, locally, an oil exploration bust. Lots of other big real estate developments in the region went bust.

"Things changed a lot in Traverse City, and it took a while for it to recover there, for the real estate market to recover," he said. "I guess in that sense, it was kind of a real accomplishment that the resort survived through all of that."