Lawrence Donegan pays a visit to Tiger's Dubai project and finds a lot of dust and no signs of a golf course anywhere near completion.
Like so much else in post-boom Dubai, the palace is a facade, propped up by wooden beams. Behind it lies a collection of portable cabins that in the glory days of the economic boom served as a sales office. These days the salesmen have gone, to be replaced by a handful of cleaners and maintenance staff trying to keep alive what is left of the $1.1bn fantasy.
There is not much; a scale model of the proposed development in one of the rooms, some dusty furniture and a telephone long disconnected. What has happened to Tiger Woods Dubai? "No comment. I don't know,'' said a Dubai-based spokesman for IMG, the sports agency that represents Woods around the world, while repeated attempts to contact the Dubai Properties Group, the government-controlled company that now owns the development, are met with no response.