Editor’s note: As the Tour Championship unfolds this week at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, GGPBiz commemorates the life of Tom Cousins, the businessman and philanthropist behind East Lake’s revival who died on July 29 at age 93. The following profile, originally published at GGP+ in April 2020, recounts how Cousins spearheaded the restoration of Bobby Jones’ home course and rehabilitation of its surrounding neighborhood, a model he later sought to replicate in other U.S. cities. The year is 1993, and the streets of Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood have a sinister feel. Storefronts are boarded up, and burned-out cars rust in vacant lots. Many of the homes that have not been abandoned have bars on their windows and doors. Drug dealers and sex workers stagger in and out of the crack houses that proliferate, and gunfire breaks out so frequently at the East Lake Meadows public housing project that locals have taken to calling it “Little Vietnam.” Someone has painted a giant skull and crossbones on one of the buildings there. Appropriatel...