Last week’s issue of Golf World featured a piece about a pending lawsuit filed against real estate developer Bobby Ginn, who has attached his name to four professional golf events, including the PGA Champions Tour’s upcoming Ginn Championship at his Hammock Beach development in Florida. Hmmm… Ginn, golf tournaments with larger-than-average purses, and lavish real estate developments in the midst of an economic downturn. Why does this all sound painfully familiar?

Maybe because I was involved in Ginn’s first foray into real estate development, his disastrous attempt to control as much as two-thirds of the undeveloped land on Hilton Head Island in the mid-1980s. His heavily leveraged deals involving the island’s two biggest development companies, the Sea Pines Company and the Hilton Head Company, collapsed like a cheap lawn chair in the midst of the nation’s savings and loan collapse. Bankruptcy proceedings ensued, island businesses were left with hundreds of thousands of dollars in receivables, and the PGA Tour came dangerously close to yanking the island’s signature event, the Heritage Classic. Those of us who manned the oars on this ship of fools fondly remember this era as “The Dark Age.”

Golf World Executive Editor Ron Sirak at least made mention of Ginn’s Hilton Head debacle in his piece. That’s a refreshing change from the media’s canonization of Ginn in recent years. For a more in-depth account, read Janet Smith’s excellent blog entry, The Resurrection of Bobby Ginn. Janet, the editorial page editor of The Island Packet, covered Ginn’s reign on Hilton Head Island and the bloody aftermath and has the best perspective on the man of anyone I know.

As Sirak notes in his piece, Ginn’s latest legal troubles–or, it seems, his troubling past–are of little significance to officials with the PGA and LPGA Tours. Ty Votaw, the former LPGA Tour commissioner who negotiated sponsorship of that tour’s Ginn Open, told Sirak that “financial guarantees are in place” for Ginn’s PGA Tour and Champions Tour events. I’m sure that comes as a relief to the 99 real estate investors who are taking Ginn to court, claiming they were sold overvalued land at Ginn developments in Florida. Or to Sterling Marlin, Joe Nemechek and the crew chiefs who sued Ginn last year during his brief, inexplicable foray into NASCAR team ownership … but that’s another story.

I truly hope that all of this has a happy ending … that Ginn’s professional tournaments thrive and his myriad real estate developments survive the housing market collapse. Just don’t ask me to drink the Kool-Aid.