Play The Champion on a nice calm morning in January and you might not understand what makes this such a tough tournament course (it hosted the 1983 Ryder Cup, the 1987 PGA, the Senior PGA from 1982 through 2000, and now the Honda Classic). The course looks like almost any Florida resort, winding around lakes and through aisles of homes…
Ponte Vedra Inn & Club’s Ocean Course is a case study for 20th century American golf architecture, in all the glorious madness. The Ocean Course opened toward the end of the Golden Age in 1928. Its popularity peaked in the 1930’s when the golf press deemed it one of the toughest and best courses in…
Florida insiders always spoke highly of the old Deltona Golf & Country Club for its nostalgic simplicity, sandy foundation and beautiful elevation changes that qualify as exotic for this flyover region between Orlando and Daytona Beach. Unfortunately the holes themselves had less appeal. Like most unmodified courses of the era, the 1964 design by regional architect David Wallace was exhausted, its gravity faded…
A favorite debate among golf architecture students and historians is about what courses constitute the most influential in the evolution of golf design. Most groupings would include St. Andrews, National Golf Links of America, Pine Valley, Augusta National, and Sand Hills. The PLAYERS Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass is often cited as another construction and cultural landmark. For better or worse (depending to…
Jam on this: A golf course snuggled as cozily into its community as a baby in a cotton sleeper. A circuit of kids, adults and dogs passing down neighboring paths. A place where everyone walks, either bag on shoulder or with a trolley. Holes of welcoming length and width, with not a blade of rough.…
I thought Southern Hills Plantation Club had a chance to win national acclaim when I first heard, around 2001, that Pete Dye was building a course in this part of west-central Florida. Being familiar with World Woods and the sand ridges that run through the Brooksville area, it seemed like the soils, the region’s big and graceful elevations…
Slammer & Squire, the original course at World Golf Village, is overshadowed by the companion Palmer/Nicklaus collaboration, King & Bear, which the resort did far more to promote when it opened in 2000. This puts the Slammer in a double bind because, since its development in the late ’90’s, the entire WGV and Hall of Fame complex near St. Augustine has failed to attract the passionate…
What does it say about Tom Fazio that the finest work to come out of his studio might be a public course in Florida that you can play for $50? It doesn’t square with the closed-door, big budget design extravaganzas we usually associate with Fazio, does it? He’s never built many public courses to begin with, much…
Depending on your view, having two courses as diverse as Mission Inn’s Las Colinas and El Campeón can either mean you have variety, or that you simply have an A course and a B course. Land planning concerns (read: selling houses) dictated that Las Colinas would be nothing like its older, tightly routed sibling, but the younger course does…
[Note: This course is permanently closed. The review was originally written in 2011] Sugarloaf Mountain should be the model for future golf course designs in Central Florida, particularly those built in the scrub, orchard and sand hills regions west and north of Orlando. That is if there are any future golf courses. Unfortunately the course and development…