The best golf courses in Florida

A majestic Donald Ross design with a clever routing on a rectangular site, each hole at Seminole encounters a new wind direction. The greens are no longer Ross, replaced 50 years ago in a regrassing effort that showed little appreciation for the original rolling contours. The bunkers aren’t Ross either. Dick Wilson replaced them in 1947, his own version meant to the imitate crests of waves on the adjacent Atlantic. A few years back, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw redesigned the bunkers again, along with exposing some sandy expanses in the rough. Seminole has long been one of America’s most exclusive clubs, which is why it was thrilling to see it on TV for a first time during the TaylorMade Driving Relief match, and then again for the 2021 Walker Cup.

TPC’s stadium concept was the idea of then-PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman. The 1980 design was pure Pete Dye, who set out to test the world’s best golfers by mixing demands of distance with target golf. Most greens are ringed by random lumps, bumps and hollows, what Dye calls his "grenade attack architecture." His ultimate target hole is the heart-pounding sink-or-swim island green 17th, which offers no bailout, perhaps unfairly in windy Atlantic coast conditions. The 17th has spawned over a hundred imitation island greens in the past 40 years. To make the layout even more exciting during tournament play, Steve Wenzloff of PGA Tour Design Services recently remodeled several holes, most significantly the 12th, which is now a drivable par 4.

Calusa’s developer, Gary Chensoff, a Chicago venture capitalist, survived a rare form of cancer despite long odds, and his recovery strongly influenced how Calusa Pines was designed and built. Chensoff decided to gamble, instructing Hurdzan-Fry to design the most unique course in south Florida despite a dead flat site. They responded by piling up fill from ponds to form ridge lines up to 58 feet, then planted them with mature oaks, pines and sabal palms. Calusa Pines sports perhaps the firmest, fastest Bermuda fairways and greens in Florida, rivaled only by the turf at Streamsong. Recent removal of overgrown vegetation between holes has returned beautiful long-range views to the course and made it more playable.

As an old pro from Pine Valley who lost an Open at Merion, George Fazio blended features of both of those great courses into his design at Jupiter Hills, the high point of his second career as a golf course architect. Built from a distinct sand ridge that runs laterally along the Atlantic seacoast north of West Palm Beach, Jupiter Hills was inexpensive to construct. The terrain was so good, only 87,000 cubic yards of earth were moved. A decade after it opened, George Fazio retired near the property, and couldn’t resist constantly tinkering with it. He ultimately removed many of its most unique, Pine Valley-like aspects. Thirty years later, his nephew Tom Fazio, who had assisted on the original, re-established many of those early characteristics, emphasizing the prominent sand ridge on which George first routed the course.

Coore and Crenshaw’s Red Course is part of a resort triple-header that gives golfers a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the differences in styles and philosophies of arguably the three of top design firms in America, including Streamsong Blue, a Tom Doak design, and Streamsong Black, from Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. The Red, like the Blue, was built from sand spoils created by a massive phosphate strip mine, with some piles forming dunes reaching 75 feet into the air. But there was only room for 31 holes, so Coore and Crenshaw had to take a section of less desirable, stripped-down land and create five holes that looked like the rest of the site, Red's holes one through five. The course has a wonderful mix of bump-and-run links holes and target-like water holes. Some greens are perched like those at Pinehurst, others are massive with multi-levels like those at St. Andrews. The turf is firm and bouncy, and while the routing is sprawling, it’s easily walkable. The Red has consistently comes out on top in this survey, but the Blue and Black are within just about a point.

The Concession was originally established by Sarasota resident Tony Jacklin, who convinced Jack Nicklaus to handle the design while Jacklin would offer design suggestions. The club name honors the famous final-putt concession from Jack to Tony in the 1969 Ryder Cup, which resulted in a tie between the teams and a moral victory for the underdog Europeans. The Concession is a terrific design, a rare Nicklaus one that’s not a residential development. The course flows across a variety of landscapes—meadows, wetlands, oak hammocks and pine forests—with spectacular bunkering and exciting green contours. Jack had been working on this course at the same time he and Tom Doak were doing Sebonack, and Jack later admitted the small, heavily-contoured greens at The Concession were inspired by those at Sebonack. In 2021, The Concession hosted the World Golf Championships - Workday Championship, won by Colin Morikawa.

The Dye Course at White Oak, our 2022 Best New Private Course winner, is one of the most exclusive golf courses to be built in recent memory. It’s located on the border of Florida and Georgia outside Jacksonville, in almost complete natural isolation. It has no members, no on-site clubhouse (or any other structures on or near the course), and hardly anyone has played it except for personal invitees of owner Mark Walter and several dozen Golf Digest panelists, who visited between October 2021 and September 2022. Walter engaged the late Pete Dye to design the course in 2013, but by the time construction began in 2017, Dye’s health had deteriorated, and he was no longer able to be active in building it. The job of finishing White Oak fell to longtime confidant and veteran course builder Allan MacCurrach, who interpreted Dye’s wishes based on extensive discussions from previous years and his own wealth of experience working with Dye on over 20 projects. Intensely private and almost entirely off the radar until now, this exclusive video tour captured by photographer Brian Oar offers the first public looks at The Dye Course at White Oak. 
 

Read our full review, including panelist comments, here.

Although congenial rivals, Tom Doak and Bill Coore actually collaborated on Streamsong’s original 36-hole routing, walking the site and mentally weaving holes around stunning mounds, lagoons, sand spits, savannahs and swamp, all elements left after a strip-mining operation. Coore then gave Doak first choice on which 18 he wanted to build, so Doak’s Blue Course includes a few holes routed by Coore. (Coore and Crenshaw’s Red, contains some holes originally envisioned by Doak.) The Blue starts a bit more dramatically, with the back tee on hole one atop a 75-foot sand dune. It has more water carries off the tee, and it’s also a bit more compact, since it sits in the center with the Red Course looping around its outside edges. The Blue definitely has the bolder set of greens, some with massive shelves and dips. The new addition of Streamsong (Black) by Gil Hanse only adds to the spirited competition among designers. The theme song at Streamsong seems to be: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”

Gil Hanse’s Black Course at Streamsong, Golf Digest’s Best New Public Course of 2018, sits a mile south of the resort’s Red and Blue Courses, with its own clubhouse and its own personality. Reshaped from a decades-old phosphate strip mine that lacking tall spoil mounds, Hanse provided strategic character by building a hidden punchbowl green at nine, dual putting surfaces at 13, incorporating a meandering creek on the par-5 fourth and a lagoon cove to guard the 18th green. Both the putting surfaces and the chipping areas surrounding them were grassed in MiniVerde, and today both are mowed at a single height, resulting in the biggest, most complex greens found on our national ranking. One Streamsong insider calls the Black greens “polarizing;” we call them tremendous fun.

If there’s such a thing as an undiscovered Tom Fazio design, it’s McArthur Golf Club, a players-only layout he did in conjunction with PGA Tour star Nick Price. It’s little-known because of its neighbors, Jupiter Hills, a few miles south, Hobe Sound G.C., one of Joe Lee’s finest, just a few miles closer, and Greg Norman’s Medalist right next door. McArthur sits astride the same sand ridge upon which Jupiter Hills and Medalist were built, and while Fazio had to deal with wetlands and easements in his routing, he framed each hole with acres of exposed white sand in the form of dunes, slopes and hollows to provide McArthur with a singularly stunning look that’s unlike any of its rivals. With those wide expanses of sand, McArthur started a trend that continues today.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:


The Bear’s Club marked a transition point in Jack Nicklaus’ design outlook when it opened in 1999. His architecture had typically been analytical and, while still lovely, oriented toward factoring how players might break down the features tactically. That strategic backbone is present in The Bear’s Club, but the team approached the design more holistically than they had previously, factoring in aesthetics to an unprecedented degree. Instead of building holes on a golf site, Jack and his associates created a golf environment, expanding and enhancing a dune ridge running through the low pine and palmetto scrub and anchoring large, sensuous bunkers into the native vegetation.
 

The course is part of an upscale residential development near the Intracoastal Waterway, but it blends so well you wouldn’t know it. The change in perspective that Nicklaus Design developed at The Bear’s Club pushed the firm toward similar successes in the 2000s like Sebonack (with Tom Doak), The Concession and Mayacama.
 

Explore more about Bear's Club with our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.

Medalist is a long, demanding course that can stretch out to roughly 7,600 yards, a necessary requirement when the membership includes Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka and many more of the world’s top professional players. They like The Medalist for the relaxed atmosphere and local convenience, but also because it’s a demanding driving course—the holes circle through an undeveloped sanctuary of wetlands and low scrub vegetation one parcel south of McArthur and are buffeted by the strong Atlantic crosswinds from every direction. Pete Dye designed Medalist with co-founder Greg Norman (this was one of Norman’s first U.S. designs) and the course features Dye’s S-shaped holes curling around sand buffers, slinky ground contour, and small, low-profile greens that bleed into short-grass surrounds. The course had undergone numerous modifications and formalizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but Bobby Weed reclaimed much of original Dye character during a 2015 renovation.

Seth Raynor built Mountain Lake, a millionaires’ winter retreat, in two stages, completing one nine in 1917 and the other four years later. As he did on all his projects, Raynor produced some “template holes” and some originals. At Mountain Lake, his par-3 fifth sports a very authentic Biarritz green and the seventh is recognizable as a Road Hole. But the par-3 11th, designed with a canted, slanted Redan green, has been reworked in recent years, with the front half of the putting surface flattened to create pin positions just above a 10-foot-deep frontal bunker. Restoration expert Ron Prichard and his associate Tyler Rae have been reclaiming Raynor features for over seven years, working most recently on perfecting the unique “circus ring” contour in the middle of the ninth green.

Long before he was President of the United States, or even a TV reality show host, Donald Trump built a golf course, on prime real estate in West Palm Beach, which he got from Palm Beach County. In exchange for a 100-year lease, Trump agreed not to sue the county for noise disturbance to Mar-A-Lago resort. He hired Tom Fazio’s older, less-celebrated brother Jim Fazio to design a course that would rival Trump’s casino rival Steve Wynn’s baby, No. 27 Shadow Creek in Vegas. Jim moved 2 million cubic yards of dirt to create 58 feet of elevation change and planted 5,000 mature trees. Lakes linked by recirculating streams were built, as was a monolithic waterfall on the 17th. The result is Shadow Creek Southeast. “Steve Wynn is a friend of mine,” Trump said in a 1999 interview. “I did get certain ideas from Shadow Creek because I think he did a very good job. I made them bigger and better.”

John's Island West was one of the last courses Tom Fazio and his associates completed as they were getting into the thick of building Shadow Creek in Las Vegas. In that regard, the course fittingly marks an end to an early Fazio phase, one before it became increasingly clear to him that, for the skills of he and his staff to be maximized, the project's budget and ambition were more critical than having strong natural assets to work with. John's Island, like Jupiter Hills an hour south, did have strong natural assets, namely a series of sand ridges, some up to 50 feet high, that were used to prop up a number of greens and tees. This provided attractive views, tough targets, and much needed relief amid a site thick with dense undergrowth. Several lakes were excavated for added fill and the surfaces of the course were cut and molded with sandy finger-like transition areas and bunkers, but the overall feel of the course is calm and not engineered. It's a wonderful snapshot of a creative use of existing land, one burnished further by Fazio's 2022 renovation.

Architects occasionally get to renovate courses they've built as their design ideas evolve or in response to changing conditions or technology. Donald Ross most famously added to and remodeled Pinehurst No. 2 thoughout his life, and Pete Dye tinkered and enhanced courses like Crooked Stick, TPC Sawgrass and Harbour Town (not always for the better). Steve Smyers had the same opportunity to make important adjustments to Old Memorial in Tampa in 2020. In the 22 years since it opened, Smyers had come to think differently about strategy and how elite players approach the game, enticing him to expand greens and make tweaks to the approaches and surrounds. What hasn't changed are the decorative bunkers that take inspiration from the courses of the Melbourne Sand Belt that Smyers is so fond of.

You might consider Naples National a test run for Calusa Pines. Built eight years earlier by the same team of architects, Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry, on a site nine miles away, Naples National occupies a similar type of vegetated, swampy non-descript land requiring significant enhancement to make it work. Excavated lakes provided material to create topographical interest, sandscapes and alluring landscaping, just on a smaller scale than at Calusa Pines where a similar approach would create a large dune system 60 feet high that holes could run up and down. Though more modest in scale and elevation change, Naples National is just as unique. A thick layer of coral rock beneath the site that had to be pounded out for necessary irrigation was repurposed as colorful edging support for lakes and hazards, and also for an ongoing motif of rock walls that run along fairways, greens and bunkers.

Black Diamond Ranch is located in out-of-the-way hill country of central Florida, some 30 miles southwest of Ocala. Part of a residential development, this Tom Fazio fantasy-come-alive features a front nine that runs up and down 60-foot-high sand hills and alongside natural sand dunes. But it’s the back-nine stretch through an old rock quarries, holes 13 through 17, that’s the real draw. You start with a par 3 over a pit, then skirt along the rim of a bigger quarry, then descend 85 feet of steep limestone cliffs to the 15th green, positioned astride a bottomless pit of lake, then emerge for more shots along the edge, then shoot down into the smaller pit to the 17th green before finishing on a conventional 18th. Black Diamond has as many twists and turns as a hard-boiled detective novel. Traditionally a private club (there are a total of 45 holes on property), Black Diamond now offers on-site accommodations and stay and play packages.

Pine Tree might have been one of Dick Wilson's most intellectual designs. At other places like NCR and Coldstream in Ohio, or Deepdale and Meadow Brook in New York, he had beautiful, uncompromised land to work on with mature trees and gentle movements. Pine Tree was vacant of nearly any defining feature other than flat Florida scrub, and everything there had to be first imagined, then built. The holes circle the site in coupled pairs, touching numberous lakes and canals. Wilson's bunkers, over 120 of them, their depth and zagged edges recently restored by Ron Forse and Jim Nagle, set up play, defending prime fairway positions and forcing acute aerial approaches into deep, strongly defended greens. Playing Pine Tree is equal parts visual treat and tactical exam.

Pablo Creek near Jacksonville is what might be considered a "quiet" Tom Fazio design. The low-publicity golf-only club, built for a discerning owner in the mid-1990s, sits along an eponymoulsy named river on the edge of a vast preserve of swamps and wetlands near the Intracoastal Waterway. The low profile holes slink through carved corridors of flat pines and along the edges of marshes and lagoons with abrupt shoulders of turf built up over bunkers and waste areas to create relief. Scoring requires straight hitting and a deft short game as hitting the small, elevated greens is anything but easy.

Perhaps best known for its membership that includes numerous professional golfers, Isleworth is an exclusive private club in the Orlando area. Tiger Woods lived adjacent to the driving range and spent much of his practice time at Isleworth in the mid-2000s. The course was originally designed by Arnold Palmer in the mid-1980s, but Steve Smyers led a significant redesign in 2004 that lengthened the course and made it more challenging. The course traverses rolling terrain and has a challenging set of green complexes with plenty of movement. Trees line most holes, most notably at the long par-3 second, where overhanging limbs on both sides creates a claustrophobic corridor playing to a long narrow green. The 2014 Hero World Challenge was played at Isleworth, where Jordan Spieth lapped the field just months before his historic 2015 campaign.

Situated on a tight, triangularly shaped property about a mile from the Atlantic Ocean in Hobe Sound, Fla., Loblolly is a challenging Pete and P.B. Dye design. Angles are key at Loblolly, as many of the narrow and tilted greens are best attacked from one side of the hole. The par-3 16th is one of the more dramatic holes on property, as any shot coming up short and right will filter down into a bunker 20 feet below the putting surface. Golf course builder Jim Urbina has recently overseen a comprehenive renovation to preserve the Dye character.

Trump bought the Ritz-Carlton resort in 2012. Its Jack Nicklaus design is one of a number of quality courses in the area—including the Bear's Club down the road and the Floridian.

The bunkering at Floridian National distinguishes it from many of the other uber-private Southwest Florida courses. Between the bright white sand and clamshell shapes, with softly rising tall lips, the bunkers share many similarities to those at Augusta National. They play an integral role in the strategy at this 7,100-yard Gary Player design, as they often pinch in where longer players would be landing off the tee. The long par-4 18th is a strong finisher and roughly resembles the famous closers at TPC Sawgrass and Pebble Beach, with the hole boomeranging to the left as water runs up the entire length of the hole. Floridian is a popular practice spot for many pros, and Claude Harmon III, Butch’s son, is the Director of Instruction.

Indian Creek was built in 1930 on an island north of Miami Beach created with sand dredged from Biscayne Bay. William Flynn designed the course at the center of the island with estate homes ringing the perimeter along the water--the massive Mediterranean-style clubhouse opens toward a clear southern view of downtown Miami. Over the decades drainage issue arose and a renovation by Flynn's former associate Dick Wilson and other tinkering had taken the shine off the original architecture. Following a 2022 rebuild by Andrew Green, the course plays dry and racy with fairways that rise into elevated greens and turn left and right around bunkers that more closely resemble what Flynn originally designed. The standout hole has always been the long par-3 12th playing from a high tee over a cove of water and field of bunkers, but the short par 4s at four and 13 that also play along the bay are just as scenic as well as thought-provoking. The par 5s at nine and 11 are also worthy of accolades, each gliding into greens situated on scenic high points. This ranking is not reflective of Green's renovation.

The linchpin of the famous four-course complex previously known as Doral Golf Resort, the Blue Monster had hosted a PGA Tour event annually from 1962 to 2016. The fearsome layout was designed by Dick Wilson in 1962 and set the template for the modern south Florida course with lakes galore, deep bunkers and greenpads elevated above the fairways for drainage and aerial target golf. Several questionable renovations in the 1990s and early 2000s moved it away from the original Wilson look, and the design was lost for a period of time. Always intended to be a course presenting shot-making demands for good players, the Blue Monster was given added bite by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner through the creation of new slopes and ridges on several holes and the excavation of new lakes on the par-3 15 and drivable par-4 16 to add more excitement to the finish. But they wisely left the legendary 18th nearly untouched. Why mess with history? The changes were completed shortly before the PGA Tour took the course out of its annual location.

As far as Jupiter-area courses go, The Dye Preserve is a bit off the beaten path, nearly 10 miles inland and west of I-95. The Pete Dye design has many of the late architect’s defining features, including railroad tie-lined water hazards, deep pot bunkers, teardrop mounding and intimidating sightlines. With the tips nearly reaching 7,300 yards and course rating just shy of 76, the course is a stern test. Like many Jupiter courses, PGA Tour and LPGA Tour players are members at The Dye Preserve.

This design, one of two stellar courses at this club in Palm Coast and one of Rees Jones' favorites, is set in the dark interior of the Intracoastal Waterway marshes and plays like an animal leaping from one dry place to another over stretches of wetlands. Not for the feint of heart or weak of swing, it was an extreme effort to build and locate enough land to support golf, and the design roams far and wide to find just enough. But the journey is worth the effort due to holes like 13, 14 and 15 that feel like dancing on a highwire over the marsh, the latter hole being a gambling go-for-broke short par 4. Each of the par 3s, particularly seven, 12 and 16, require unflinching shots over swamp or water, with miss-hits reaching into the pocket for another ball.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:

I've always been fascinated by the design of Bay Hill, Arnold Palmer's home course for over 45 years (although Tiger Woods owns it, competitively-speaking, as he's won there eight times.) For one thing, it's rather hilly, a rarity in Florida (although not in the Orlando market) and dotted with sinkhole ponds incorporated in the design in dramatic ways.
 

I always thought the wrap-around-a-lake par-5 sixth was Dick Wilson's version of Robert Trent Jones's decade-older 13th at The Dunes Club at Myrtle Beach. Each of the two rivals had claimed the other was always stealing his ideas. But the hole I like best at Bay Hill is the par-4 eighth, a lovely dogleg-right with a diagonal green perched above a small circular pond. OK, I admit that it reminds me of the sixth at Hazeltine National, another Trent Jones product, but I don't think Wilson picked Trent's pocket on this one, as both courses were built about the same time, in the early 1960s.I should pause here to point out that I have always given credit to Wilson (who died in 1965, four years after it opened) for the design of Bay Hill, going all the way back to the book I co-authored with Geoff Cornish, The Golf Course, first published in 1981. But the authorship of Bay Hill has been contested, and therein lies a story.

It starts with a call I received in late 1983 from Thomas F. Barnes, Jr., a Florida real estate developer, who saw my book and called to tell me that I had it wrong. Dick Wilson didn't design Bay Hill, Barnes said. He designed it, and Wilson merely reviewed his design, suggested a change and loaned him an associate, Bob Simmons, to construct the course.

Explore more about Bay Hill with our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.

Located along the popular and stylish Highway 30A section of northwest Florida, Camp Creek is available to play for guests staying in the WaterColor and WaterSound communities. An underated course in the Fazio portfolio, the design explores several ecosystems including a sand and dunes section near the breezy Gulf Coast, holes that play around a series of internal lakes and a forest loop on the northside of the property with some of the course's best holes, including the reachable par-5 12th with a centerline bunker awaiting second shots, the short par-4 13th playing up to a tabletop green, the gorgous downhill par-3 14th nestled against water and the long, stout par-4 15th with a large, wavy green.

Loxahatchee was a course of its time when it opened in the 1980s. Jack Nicklaus studded it with sharp chocolate-drop mounding around greens and fairways that was all the rage as architects began fiffing on the shapes Pete Dye was building. That kind of thing soon went out of style and most of those features have since been removed from Loxahatchee. What's left behind is less dated but nevertheless a quintessentially Florida 1980's-style penal design with 14 holes that have water in play, including the possibility of rinsing your ball hitting into at least 11 greens.

The Copperhead course is most famous for hosting the PGA Tour's Valspar Championship every April, but Innisbrook is home to three more championship courses—Island, North and South—with views more like the sand hills of the Carolinas than you might expect in Florida. The Copperhead course is a tough ball-striking challenge with tight, tree-lined fairways and a demanding three-hole finish—known as the Snake Pit—that often makes for dramatic finishes to the annual PGA Tour stop.

One of five courses at PGA National, the Champion Course hosts the Honda Classic every year. Originally designed by Tom and George Fazio for tournament play, Jack Nicklaus redesigned the course in 2014, creating the infamous three-hole stretch aptly named "The Bear Trap." Routinely one of the toughest courses on Tour, The Champion is a true ball-striking test.

This scenic Jack Nicklaus-designed South Florida track has six holes that play along the Atlantic Ocean, with a challenging four-hole finishing stretch nicknamed “The Bear Claw.” The course, which hosted the 2003 U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links, is one of two at the resort and features a classic Nicklaus design: generous fairways and well-protected greens.

Shark's Tooth fits nicely into the oeuvre of Greg Norman's Florida work. Located on the banks of Lake Powell just west of Panama City Beach and east of Highway 30A with five holes that play along the marshy shore, the design features the Shark's trademark wall-to-wall fairway cut, bright white bunkers the jut into the line of play, crushed coquina shell transition areas and slick-shouldered greens that fade into close-cropped chipping swales.

Emerald Dunes was developed as a high-end public course. Now it's one of the most sought-after private courses in the Palm Beach market with initiation fees to match. The design weaves around a series lakes, and water or marshes come into play on nearly every hole. Knowing that the lakes would be so prevalent, team Fazio played up the "aquatic theme" as he calls it carving scalloped edge banks and nurturing native plants along the shorelines.

La Gorce was among the first wave of golf courses built in Southeast Florida during the 1920s. Like neighbors Indian Creek and Normandy Shores, it and its surrounding real estate development were created with material dredged from its site on Biscayne Bay, a major engineering endeavor at the time. The club turned the course over to the city following World War II, and in the 1950s Robert Trent Jones initiated a major renovation to bring it in line with modern tastes and demands. The course has continued to evolve and change. Jack Nicklaus remodeled the course in the 1990s, and it continues to make improvements going forward.

Open to members and guests of the resort, Gasparilla Golf Club rests on the picturesque coast of Charlotte Harbor. Though it perhaps lacks the overall ambiance and archtiecture, the proximity of the design to the water (five holes run directly along the harbor shore) and the exposure to the gusty winds puts Gasparilla in the same category of other Pete Dye seaside courses like Teeth of the Dog and The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island. Tripp Davis is currently renovating the course, hoping to imbue it with more vintage Dye-like features that have been worn away.

When Ron Garl designed Golden Ocala in the 1980s it was believed to be golf's first tribute course. Located in the horse country of live oaks and gentle hills surrounding Ocala, an hour northeast of Orlando, the original 18 possessed holes that Garl designed but others that were approximate replicas of famous holes from around the world including Augusta National's 12th and 13th holes, a version of the Road Hole complete with a stone wall at the corner, the par-3 fourth at Baltusrol, the par-4 third at Oakmont, just to name several.

Old Corkscrew, designed by Jack Nicklaus, is routed through the natural landscape of Southwest Florida (no homes!), serving as a habitat for dozens of exotic animals. The challenging layout plays among cypress trees, tall pines and wetlands, demanding accuracy over distance throughout. Though it's 30 minutes northeast of Naples, Old Corkscrew's absence of homes and tranquil setting make it unique in Southwest Florida—and well worth the drive.

Hammock Beach is a Golf Digest Editors' Choice award-winning resort in Florida and has two of the best public courses in Florida: The first being the Tom Watson-designed Conservatory course, which is more inland than the Jack Nicklaus-designed Ocean course. The Conservatory course is not your typical Florida resort course—its rocco architecture is infused with British links-style features including steep mounding throughout and boasts elaborate stone work, waterfalls, streams, marshes, deep pot bunkers, waste areas and wave-like greens.

At first glance this course seems typically "south Florida" with the golf holes almost a secondary consideration to the housing masterplan, strung out single-file with little sense of rhythm or connectivity. Upon closer look, it's anything but typical. In 2011, architect Steve Smyers completely remodeled the original mid-2000s design (it's never a good sign when a course needs a complete makeover at only four years of age), revamping the greens and bunkering in more strategic ways. His inspirations were the shapes and ideologies of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor in the 1910s and '20s, though the holes are not replicas of their templates. Instead he examined playing lines and routes into greens and adjusted the more simplified bunkering to create risk and reward options and shades of gray decisions. Most notable he installed one of the state's most unique sets of greens, presenting their slopes, tiers and platforms in geometric shapes: squares, rectangles, arched rectangles and even triangles.

Of the public options sprinkled across Naples, Greg Norman's Tiburón courses at the Ritz-Carlton provide the best balance of quality golf and convenience, situated in the heart of North Naples. That ideal combination comes at a cost, though, as green fees can be upwards of $300. The Gold course—ranked on our Best Courses You Can Play in Florida list—features stacked sod wall bunkers and no conventional rough and is home to the LPGA’s CME Group Tour Championship and the PGA Tour’s QBE Shootout.

There is some uncertainty whether this course was designed by Donald Ross as for years it was believed to be. At some point, however, accurate attribution takes a back seat to whether or not the design is of the first rank. In this case it is. The Country Club of Orlando's routing maximizes every available inch and manages to create distinctive looks and strategies despite a number of holes moving back and forth in the same direction. No matter who first designed it, credit for elevating it into the top percentile of a state with over 2,000 courses belongs to architect Ron Forse who reworked the holes in 2017.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
 

There’s so much to learn about Sara Bay Country Club. Let's start with its history. In his 1927 autobiography, Down the Fairway, Bobby Jones, then 25, (still three years shy of the Grand Slam climax to his golf career) offered one of the more ironic golf course appraisals of all time. "I regard the Whitfield Estates course as one of the best in America," he wrote.

 

It's ironic for two reasons. First, the course had gone belly up by the time Jones book’ hit bookstores. OK, the book was based on a series of articles previously published in Liberty Magazine, so the course was still viable when Jones first wrote the line.

 

The course wouldn't be revived until 1937, first as Sarasota Bay Country Club, renamed in 1964 as Sara Bay Country Club. It's also ironic because Jones was on the staff of the firm hired to promote real estate sales around the course, so arguably his was a paid endorsement, although he didn't reveal that at the time. It was certainly a big-time Roaring Twenties operation.

 

The club hired famed golfer Tommy Armour (who would win the 1927 U.S. Open at Oakmont) as head professional and amateur Perry Adair, of Adair Real Estate was retained to sell homes. Adair made his good friend Jones an "assistant sales manager," with the apparent sole duty of playing promotional golf exhibitions on the course in front of prospective buyers. Despite all the marquee names, the development struggled, and in 1927 Whitfield closed. It was revived 10 years later, briefly as a public course, by digging the course out from under 10 years' growth of shrubbery. Apparently the reclamation wasn't ideal, for a few years before his death, Ross told a reporter that, other than Pinehurst No. 2, Whitfield was as good a course as he'd ever designed, "before the membership messed it up.”

Explore more about Sara Bay Country Club with our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.

There are pieces of TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course in the club's second course, Dye's Valley. Behold the pot bunkers and deep grassy basins around greens. See the water hazards lined with bulkheads, and the large mounds bordering many of the holes. The arcing fairways with inside hazards are present too, creating just enough uncertainty on the driving line to make even good players uncomfortable. All of Pete Dye's tricks and trademarks (as interpreted by Bobby Weed) are here with the exception of an island green par 3 (though there's a peninsula green angled over water), just in smaller doses as the routing wends out through a residential section. But it's exactly what's needed for a high end public club's "second" course--just enough of the top course to whet the appetite, but at a fraction of the price and demand.