By Emily Ford
eford@salisburypost.com
KANNAPOLIS ó Charlotte native Davis Love III and NASCAR driver Kyle Petty will play an exhibition round of golf Monday to christen the Club at Irish Creek.
Love designed the course, which has received national acclaim.
Love and Petty, longtime friends, will tee off exactly two years after Castle & Cooke North Carolina announced the golf project as part of its development of the $1.5 billion N.C. Research Campus.
The event is private.
Love, a PGA champion and All-American at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completely remade the Kannapolis Country Club course. Golfweek declared the results “spectacular” and a “very strong candidate” for the magazine’s top 100 courses of the modern era.
Castle & Cooke plans 585 luxury homes for the Club at Irish Creek to help attract scientists and industry leaders to Kannapolis. N.C. Research Campus founder David Murdock, billionaire owner of Dole Food Co., created the biotech complex to improve health and nutrition.
The Club at Irish Creek is located in Landis and the Rowan County portion of Kannapolis. It’s part of an ongoing transformation of Kannapolis from mill village to biotech hub.
The Core Laboratory Building and two other university buildings in downtown Kannapolis, about a mile from the golf course, officially open Oct. 20.
Developers expect the first homes at Irish Creek to be completed in January 2009.