Julian Robertson got into the golf business by accident. The famed founder of Tiger Management, who passed away in 2022, took his family on a self-imposed sabbatical to New Zealand in 1978 while he was still in his 40s. “They lived in Auckland,” says his son Alex, who wasn’t born yet, and “traveled the whole country. He had a really high opinion of the people and the natural beauty of the land.”
Shortly after Robertson returned to the States, a friend showed him pictures of a ranch he’d bought in New Zealand. Intrigued, Robertson told his friend that if his real estate guy had anything else interesting he should come by. A few days later, the man was in Robertson’s office, showing him a 6,000-acre tract of beautiful land tumbling down to the cliffs over Matauri Bay, almost four hours north of Auckland. “He was immediately enamored,” Alex says, and bought it as an investment.
