Three months after Jim Justice bought The Greenbrier out of bankruptcy in 2009, he leveraged his powers of persuasion and an old friendship to bring the PGA Tour to his resort, an unprecedented event for West Virginia.
Justice's high school golf teammate, Slugger White, was a PGA vice president.
"Now I need you to help me get a PGA tournament," Justice told his friend after he bought The Greenbrier.
"That's one tough nut to crack," White responded
"Well, Slugger, we cracked the nut," Justice said, when he announced the golf tournament would be coming to West Virginia.
Two years later, West Virginia would pay $1.75 million to become a sponsor of the tournament, continuing as a sponsor every year until this one, when Justice, now running for governor and under political pressure, renounced the sponsorship.
In 2014, Justice, again leveraging personal connections and some state money, brought the New Orleans Saints to The Greenbrier for training camp, another unprecedented event for West Virginia.
Justice had schmoozed Saints head coach Sean Payton when he was in town to play in the 2013 Greenbrier Classic pro-am. And Justice's lobbyist, then-Democratic Party Chairman Larry Puccio, schmoozed legislative leadership into extending tourism tax credits to help Justice build football facilities for the Saints. Last year, the NBA's New Orleans Pelicans followed suit and held part of their training camp at The Greenbrier.
Now Justice wants to do similar things for the state at large: He's made tourism promotion a significant part of his campaign for governor, arguing that West Virginia isn't taking advantage of its tourism potential and that it needs him as its "marketer in chief."
West Virginia is just getting the "parsley on the edge of the plate," when it comes to tourism, Justice is fond of saying, and should be thinking much bigger.
He touts his business experience and personal contacts as assets for a potential governor.
"I can pick up the phone and call almost anybody in the world and they'll at least take my call," he said last year.
He announced last week that he intends to create 16,000 new tourism jobs.
His campaign said that number comes from estimating 8.5 percent growth in the state's tourism industry over four years.
West Virginia is already doing some of the things he recommended, and some of his ideas seem to range from aspirational, if you're being generous, to pie-in-the-sky, if you're not. Then again, nobody ever thought the PGA, NFL and NBA would hold annual events in West Virginia.
Justice wants to increase the state's tourism advertising budget "and launch a more aggressive marketing campaign - think 'Pure Michigan.'"
The state's tourism advertising budget was one of many casualties of this year's budget crisis, as the Legislature chopped about $1.7 million from tourism advertising for the 2016-17 budget.
But it's still much higher than it used to be, after the Legislature, in 2015, gave the state Division of Tourism an additional $4.7 million for advertising.
Justice's opponent, Republican state Senate President Bill Cole, said that we "undersell and under-invest in our tourism industry" and said he would focus on promoting existing industries like rafting, ATV trails and camping.
"As Senate President, I restored $4 million in funding to tourism," Cole said. "As governor, I will go out and market our state, telling West Virginia's story."
The tourism funding bump followed a 2014 study by Longwoods International, a research firm that also worked on the "Pure Michigan" campaign. The study said that every dollar the state spends on tourism advertising yields $7 in tax revenue.
Based on the research, the Division of Tourism launched its "Real" campaign, pushing the state as an outdoors destination. Photos of shooting stars are overlaid with the slogan "Real. Nightlife," for example, and touted on social media.
The state's tourism Facebook page (tagline: Real. Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia) didn't exist two years ago, but now has nearly 180,000 likes.
"I don't know why we can't have the next Dollywood here," Justice is fond of asking, referring to the Tennessee theme park, co-owned by Dolly Parton.
He wants to attract a "Disney type" resort to West Virginia and said he will explore building a theme park in the southern part of the state "promoting our rich heritage."
There are, it turns out, good reasons why theme parks locate where they do, and while those reasons don't necessarily preclude West Virginia as a locale, they don't bode well. And they don't point to a theme park as a likely economic boon for struggling parts of the state.
John Gerner, the managing director of Leisure Business Advisors, a Richmond, Virginia, consulting firm, writes feasibility studies for theme parks, outlining where and how they can practically build and expand. He has done work for both Dollywood and Disney World.
"In both those cases there were conditions that made it a natural location," Gerner said. "The idea, in our industry, of the 'build it and they will come,' that's really not how these situations have happened."
Walt Disney himself scouted the location for Disney World, choosing Orlando because of the year-round warm climate, but also because of how easy it was to get to. Orlando had a nearby airport and was at the nexus of the new Interstate 4 and the Florida Turnpike, accessibility factors that many areas in southern West Virginia are lacking.
"It wasn't like he found cheap land and said 'I'll build it and everyone will come to my park,'" Gerner said. "That's an important consideration - would this be really a natural location for a theme park?"
Dollywood, in addition to being near Parton's hometown, is located where it is because it latched on to a pre-existing tourist attraction, not because it created one out of thin air, Gerner said.
Dollywood, less than an hour from Knoxville, is at the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
"The [national] park is what drove that area," Gerner said. "A theme park typically works off a situation where you have an existing tourist area or an existing residential market."
And while Southern West Virginia does have existing tourism - the New River Gorge, the Hatfield-McCoy Trail - "the question would be, is there enough to support a theme park?" Gerner said.
A decently sized theme park usually requires about 100 acres of flat land, something that is in short supply in West Virginia.
Grant Herring, a Justice spokesman, said that there are possible sites near the Hatfield-McCoy Trail, but didn't offer any specifics.
Theme parks as economic development projects have almost never been successful and include at least one infamous cautionary tale - a theme park that was also supposed to promote a region's "rich heritage."
In 1984, with the local auto industry fading, Six Flags opened AutoWorld in Flint, Michigan, a combination theme park-museum that celebrated the region's automotive history.
The theme park, built with more than $36 million in public funding, was meant to revitalize Flint as a tourist attraction.
It struggled to attract visitors and closed within six months.
It would re-open, fitfully, several times, but closed permanently in 1991. It was torn down in 1997.
"I always advise against trying to use a theme park as an economic revitalization tool," Gerner said. "The idea of, say, putting it in an economically depressed area that doesn't have any tourism at all, that's a real challenge and I would be hard-pressed to think of one successful example."
Justice also said he wants to bring a "major horse race" to the Charles Town race track in the state's Eastern Panhandle.
The Breeders' Cup, the only major American horse race that rotates venues, is probably too big for Charles Town, said Joe Clancy, the editor and publisher of This is Horse Racing, an industry news site.
"They want the track to be a mile around," as opposed to Charles Town's three-quarter-mile track, Clancy said. "And they'd need to handle a much larger crowd than Charles Town could probably handle."
Herring said, "Jim wants to do for horse racing what he did for golf at The Greenbrier - establish a major race."
The track already has the Charles Town Classic, held each April, whose $1 million-plus purse attracts some national names.
"It doesn't get 50,000 people though," Clancy said. "If you created a weekend, or added other things, they probably could spin it up into something like that."
Just as West Virginia offered tax credits that helped Justice lure the Saints (those credits are worth up to $6.8 million to The Greenbrier, if tax revenues increase), neighboring Kentucky has used tax credits to lure horse races.
In 2015, Kentucky agreed to exempt Keeneland racetrack from taxes on horse betting during the weekend it hosted the Breeders' Cup last year.
Justice also talks about "luring private investment" to West Virginia and wants to bring a wildlife park to the New River Gorge, a water park to the Northern Panhandle and wants to spur more private development around existing state parks. He said he will "provide incentives" to help with development plans.
Asked if that meant tax credits, state-backed bonds or other forms of government money, Herring said "it would be on a case-by-case basis, on how many good-paying jobs a project can bring to the state."
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.