Of the two courses at Orange Country National, Crooked Cat has more appeal to me than Panther Lake. Both courses are built in former citrus groves west of Orlando over nice natural topography and very little tree cover. The soil is arid and sandy with no development anywhere near, and it lends a rustic, country aura to the entire establishment. Crooked…
Panther Lake has always been considered the marquee course between the two at Orange County National. It’s an engaging design with strong personality and fine individual holes, and you’ll like them even better if you’re a low-handicap player who can fly the ball high into elevated greens with bunkers and other dangers guarding their fronts. My choice, however, is the other…
When The Raven course at this mega-resort opened in the late 1990’s it was meant to signal that northwest Florida finally had the major, marquee destination course the region had always lacked. Turns out $12 million can get you a pretty good and pretty interesting golf course, but it’s not enough to swing golf’s spotlight all the way…
I lived about an hour away from the King & Bear when it was being finished in 2000. At the time, the co-design of this new course between Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer was a big, one of a kind deal — curiosity was high and the PR rollout was in full gear. Such a prospect was and remains interesting. How did the process work,…
Sometimes lost in discussions about golf courses and sites and design is the understanding that golf is, fundamentally, a sport. We wield specialized equipment, wear standardized uniforms of a sort, and take what skills we have onto prescribed playing courts of roughly the comparable configurations and durations. With this in mind it’s not misguided to…
Let’s dispel with the obvious right away: no course built in Florida, on any kind of bermuda, zoysia or paspalum grass, is going to play like a links course. With that out of the way, the New Course at Grand Cypress Resort is an earnest and worthy ode to the Old Course at St. Andrews. Ground contour and the scuttling reaction of balls over firm…
I know there are people who prefer the Rolling Oaks course at World Woods to Pine Barrens. Let’s just say I won’t be planning a golf trip with them anytime soon. In the context of what else is available in Florida, Rolling Oaks — one of two Tom Fazio-designed options at this tremendous daily-fee outpost an hour north of Tampa — is actually one…
Mission Inn, located 30 minutes or so northwest of Orlando in what remains rural and still underpopulated citrus country, is one of Florida’s oldest and in many ways most charming resorts. Doors opened at the original Floridian Hotel in 1924, but the first golf course, now called El Campeón, dates back to 1917. The Beucher family…
The lovely 10th, working back toward the sea, shows how smart bunkering can give fairways sinuous movement within straight hole corridors. (photo: thebreakers.com) No one alive today can tell us if the original course at The Breakers (now the resort’s Ocean Course) is anything like it was 90 or 100 years ago. But when you go there, it sure feels like golf from…
You might think that the Tournament Players Club Sawgrass’s Dye’s Valley Course would be pretty comparable to the adjacent Stadium Course . They were built six years apart and share, roughly, the same property, the same architects, the same ownership and operators, the same evidence of enormous earth-moving and a majority of the same design features. There sure…