When a small hole formed on the putting green at a golf course owned by billionaire Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris, officials panicked and said to fill it up and carry on with business as usual. However, a torrential rainstorm hit and turned it into a gaping sinkhole, revealing a massive secret hidden under the course.
Although experts told the fishing and tackle magnate worth $4.4 billion to fill the hole and forget it back in May of 2015, the curious outdoorsman decided to go with his gut and dig to see what was down there. Now, the landscape of his Top of the Rock golf course looks completely different, as the ever-expanding project to reveal the remarkable discovery is still underway.
When the rain hit in December, a pond should have formed in this particular area, but instead the water mysteriously disappeared. That led Morris and his project manager, Jimmy Wolfinbarger, to believe that there was something beneath the earth that was sucking it in. What they didn’t realize until it opened up, was that all of the water had escaped into a cavernous tunnel system that Morris had no clue was there until now, according to the News-Leader.
The fact that his golf course was on top of a cave was particularly exciting for Morris, who is a cave enthusiast and even owns others nearby. So, when officials suggested he ignore that it was there, he wasn’t going to forgo the chance of an incredible expedition, regardless of the cost of unearthing it.
One of Morris’ workers noticed that water was pouring through a remote cave they had been exploring since 1993, which seemed to be coming out of nowhere. This led them to believe that it was connected to tunnels under the golf course, which meant that the entire thing was much larger than they originally thought.
