Trained as an engineer, Bell is an average golfer with no experience running a global design firm, but he has worked for Woods for most of his career. In 1999, the golfer, struggling with his game, asked Bell to caddy for him at the Buick Invitational. Bell had caddied for Woods before, at the U.S. Amateur in 1996. This time, Woods’ selecting him was meant to send a message to his regular caddy, Mike “Fluff” Cowan, a big man with a walrus mustache who had been carrying Woods’ bag since he turned pro. But Cowan had begun capitalizing on his association with Woods to endorse products, much to the pro golfer’s chagrin. A few weeks after the Buick, Woods fired Cowan and hired a new, more discreet caddy.

Bell is Robin to Woods’ Batman, and he’s clearly comfortable in the role. But with limited knowledge of course design, Bell sticks to running the business. Beau Welling oversees course design.

Woods recently hired Glenn Greenspan to handle his public relations. Little known outside the golf world, Greenspan is regarded as the ultimate pit bull by golf insiders. For the previous 12 years, he worked as the director of communications for the Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the Masters, where he shut down a media storm over a campaign to admit women as members.

“Tiger’s well advised,” says Bill Woodson, managing director and head of family-wealth planning at Credit Suisse. “If you can hire the right people, they’ll take on these responsibilities and do it well. You can stay focused on what you’re doing.”

Yet the Cliffs and Punta Brava people I spoke to have been surprised by how involved Woods has been. “I don’t think I expected the intensity,” Cliffs V.P. Brazinski says. “When Tiger shows up, he puts on his boots, gets a bottle of water, and says, ‘Let’s go.’ When some of the other designers come, they just want to see it by helicopter.”

McCombs had a similar experience in dealing with Woods on Punta Brava. “He has spent three times as much time on the property as I have,” McCombs says. “He was interested in far more than just putting his name on it.”

What is now the 12th hole at Punta Brava, a beautiful expanse along the Pacific Ocean, was originally slated to become a cluster of prime homesites. “Tiger said no way,” McCombs says. “He was absolutely right. Structurally, it was the right decision.”

Woods has been planning his new courses for the past two years. His managers at IMG began brokering the deal for the project in Dubai in 2006. In December of that year, a month after taking the helm of Tiger Woods Design, Bell was approached by Punta Brava backers about involving Woods in the project. Bell toured the site in January 2007 but took another year to commit. A few months later, in April 2007, Woods was approached by the Cliffs team.

With Woods now ramping up his work off the links, some golf fans are concerned that his game will suffer. The history of professional sports is littered with players who have lost focus while pursuing riches. “All that money that comes from sports comes in quickly, and it goes out just as quickly,” says George Foreman, the heavyweight boxing champion turned entrepreneur. “I don’t care if they sign you for $100 million—that’s just your start into business. That’s not your nest egg. You could lose that in a second.”

Foreman, who says he admires Woods, retired in 1977 at age 28 and thought he was set for life. Ten years later, out of shape and nearly broke, he was forced to return to the ring to raise money. “I went back into boxing the second time just for business,” he says.

In 1993, a year before he regained the heavyweight title, Foreman was contacted by the appliance maker Salton, which asked him to serve as its pitchman for a new grill. “They said, ‘We don’t have any money,’ so they gave me 45 percent of the thing,” Foreman says. In 1999, Salton bought out Foreman’s stake in the George Foreman Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, paying him a reported $127.5 million, plus $10 million in stock for the right to use his name and image in perpetuity.

Woods emphasizes that he is going to design, as he puts it, a limited collection of courses. He will not put a number on how many, but the implication is that it will be fewer than Nicklaus’ 337. This may be an acknowledgment that Woods realizes he can’t commit to designing a dozen courses a year while continuing to play golf at the highest level.

A couple of days after winning the 2008 U.S. Open, with much of the sports world focused on the state of his knee, Woods was in Mexico to vet Punta Brava’s new layout for the 22nd time—more than five times as many site visits as most brand-name golf course architects do.

Woods limped across the slick rocks to the 17th tee, the Pacific Ocean spraying up around him. Once he made it across, he could survey what he had been looking for: a stunning piece of land with a peak in the background and water all around.

Brady Oman, one of McCombs’ partners, says that Woods stayed at the site of the future golf course for three and a half hours. “I was either next to him or behind him the whole time. His knee was buckling. He would twist and turn, and it would sound like a toolbox,” Oman says. “After about two and a half hours of this, I turned to Tiger and said, ‘We don’t have to keep walking this. We can get into a Suburban.’ He said, ‘The hell with it. I’ll get it fixed.’ ”

After walking the course and shooting a video for potential home buyers, Woods left Punta Brava. He flew directly to Park City, Utah, and early the next morning underwent the knee surgery that has sidelined him ever since.

“I have to shield him, but I don’t have to shield him so he can maintain his focus,” Mark Steinberg, his longtime agent, says.