So you're planning a golf vacation to Florida. Which gleaming
mega-resort will you visit? Some tile-roofed citadel with a half-dozen
restaurants, 500 seaside guest rooms and three perfectly manicured golf
courses?
You could sift through a stack of slick brochures and easily
locate such a destination. But perhaps you'd rather return to an era when life
and golf were simpler; a time when golf in Florida was more like a walk in the park than a monorail
ride at the Magic
Kingdom.
Miraculously, such sweet havens still exist. Nearly 70
courses built at the dawn of the 20th century have survived the glitzing of
Florida, and
two-thirds of them are open to the public. Some are nestled in orange-blossom
backwoods, while others offer peaceful respite amid urban sprawl. All overflow
with tradition and charm.
Our old-world Florida golf
tour begins in suburban Jacksonville. Here in 1925, during the peak of
a land boom that triggered an explosion of golf-course development, Donald Ross
designed Hyde Park Golf Club as an alternate course for the elite membership of
Old Florida
Country Club. This sleepy little facility, dense with mature oaks dripping
Spanish moss, eventually opened its doors to the public.
Except for missing some bunkers that were removed during the
belt-tightening Depression years, Hyde Park
remains remarkably authentic. True to Ross form, the smallish, inverted-saucer
greens tilt back to front and the finishing holes make you work especially hard
for par. The 6,468-yard layout is made tougher by nine ponds that swallow
botched shots and gentle doglegs that ask for draws or fades.
Forty miles south of Jacksonville lies America’s oldest city, St. Augustine, founded by
the Spanish in 1565. Here another Donald Ross treasure, this one of 1916
vintage, stirs reflection. Located at the Ponce de Leon Hotel, this consummately
traditional, 6,823-yard layout was the notion of railroad tycoon Henry Flagler,
who virtually launched Florida’s reputation as a vacation playground
by building a string of lavish hotels along its east coast.
The course was built on the outskirts of town and became a
popular stop on the Grapefruit Circuit, the Florida leg of the nascent PGA and LPGA tours.
Babe Zaharias, Louise Suggs, Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson were a few of the big
names that lit up the leader board during those early years.
Today, golf is the main attraction at an attractive hotel and
conference center of modest scale. (The original hotel is now Flagler College.) The showstopper is the par-3 5th
hole, which plays over a reedy creek to a bulkheaded green backdropped by a
seemingly infinite stretch of marsh. Byron Nelson made an ace on this hole in
1937.
From St. Augustine, it’s about
a 90-minute drive to Howey-in-the-Hills, a tiny hamlet in the lake-laced citrus
country of Central Florida. This community
sprung up in 1916 when a financier named William J. Howey purchased 60,000 acres
with the intent of establishing the world’s largest citrus empire. His dream
crashed along with the stock market in 1929, but the course built by Scottish
architect Charles E. Clarke eventually became part of the Spanish Colonial-style
Mission Inn Golf and Tennis Resort.
