Left: Built in 1992, the Mall of America offers 4. 3 miles of total store front footage. Bottom: Opened in 1982, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome will give way next year to Target Field, the new home of the Twins.
The area’s professional sports team landscape includes the Twins, Vikings, Timberwolves and Wild – making Minneapolis one of a handful of cities in the country to house an MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL franchise.
Next month, the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers move out of the Metrodome, too, and into its own sparkling outdoor TCF Stadium, marking the return of college football to campus for the first time since 1981.
Minnesotans love their lakes and rivers (including a little one called the Mississippi), their summer sun and, of course, their golf.
That’s probably because the time to enjoy them all is so fleeting in such a Northern clime where the residents like to joke there’s just two seasons: Winter and road construction.
COURTESY OF THE MINNESOTA T WINS COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT
It is the only state that has hosted all 13 U. S. Golf Association championships as well the Curtis Cup, Walker Cup and State Team tournaments.
In the last seven years alone, Minnesota has been home to two PGA Championships, the Solheim Cup and the 2008 U.S. Women’s Open, the latter two events played at Interlachen Country Club in Edina, where Bobby Jones so famously skipped a ball across the water at the 1930 U.S. Open.
The Champions Tour also makes a stop in suburban Blaine every summer.
A 2007 economic-impact study commissioned by golf industry leaders calculated golf’s economic impact on the state at 1.2 billion the previous year, a figure determined by a myriad of factors including the number of visitors drawn to Minnesota by its nationally-rated resort courses in the northern Brainerd Lakes and Iron Range areas as well as its metro daily-fee courses, retail sales, new construction and residential development and many other goods and services. Golf, according to the study, employed 35,000 Minnesotans, including more than 500 PGA Professionals.