At first glance it might look like Team Norman mailed this one in. There doesn’t appear to be much to the course, especially against the backdrop of the property’s two overlord hotels, a Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott. Granted, Norman didn’t have great material to work with — essentially a flat, soggy wetland preserve in south Orlando’s Shingle Creek…
Black Bear is located north of Orlando in a kind of rural badlands full of scrub, sand and pockets of wetlands preserves, though the site for this course is dry and fairly rugged. I call this “country golf” because there’s not much else around this slowly rolling property with scant trees and few people. The…
LPGA International provides a good lesson why resorts and clubs should hire different architects when building more than one course. First, why not offer variety? Second, it’s insurance against the one of the courses falling out of style, or out of favor, as it did here. It isn’t often in a golf lineup that an Arthur…
The Champions Course at LPGA International is Rees Jones in all his stereotypical glory with repeated perimeter bubble humps and cartoonish bunkers. The uniformly round and oval greens look like they were designed by computers programmed to calculate perfectly spaced 1 through 5 pin positions separated by linear shelves and tiers. The entire site is flat and rotten with…
Julington Creek Golf Club is the kind of course that’s hard to say much of anything about, good, bad or indifferent. Well, maybe indifferent. It’s basic, competent Jacksonville golf, which is to say it’s flat, roams enormously through a development, features a good bit of water and a few wetland crossings, and has little unique character.…
On one hand it’s easy to recommend Southern Dunes because, between the ropes, it’s a Central Florida original. Steve Smyers’ design has much going for it — great raw material sitting atop a deep sand ridge, gliding elevations, distinctive bunkering that creates distance illusions and alternate angles of play, putting surface contour with knobs, slopes and other…
We’ll never know how good this course originally was (for many years it was an amenity for the historic Belleview Biltmore hotel up the road) because it began to fall into disrepair due to various financial crises shortly after it opened in 1925. Likely it was never very special — Ross’s topographical map would have been pretty…
Compared to Ocean Links, Amelia Island Plantation’s other (now deceased) resort course, Oak Marsh is both more solid and less interesting. The holes follow a standard real estate development configuration, playing through wooded condos on the inland side of Highway A1A along the Amelia River and Intracoastal Waterway. Each nine starts slow, flowing in counterclockwise and clockwise rotations on either side…
Any course that claims to be Florida’s “mountain course” cannot be taken seriously. This is a state that considers a mountain anything that’s higher than the roof of your house. However. Sanctuary Ridge, located at the north end of Lake Wales Ridge near Clermont, is in fact situated on some of the state’s most vertiginous real estate. The…
At first glance — from the road, the clubhouse, the scorecard — The Golf Club at Fleming Island looks like most 1990’s-early 2000’s Florida real estate courses. There seems to be a lot of homes around, a lot of water and along the entrance road there are even a couple of “display” holes posed over retention lakes…