In 1928, it took genuine vision to re-imagine a deserted
mining operation just north of Jacksonville as one of Florida’s finest golf clubs and resorts. But
that’s just what the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club became.
From its inception, when the club provided a winter getaway
for upper-tier families of New York, Philadelphia and New
England, Ponte Vedra has relied on its size and scale to provide
comforting service without relying too much on further expansion and
development. The plan of the resort is based around a central boulevard, dotted,
then as now, with walkers and cyclists, along which the resort amenities are
comfortably and generously spaced. The buildings are not old, but the sight of
their understated design calls up a time when vacationers made a more modest
claim on Florida itself.
Straight as a small-town Main Street, within a hundred yards of the
Atlantic, this road is the spine of Ponte
Vedra, bringing to mind the broad sweep of an old boardwalk, rather than the
artificially curved roadways of modern developments. Close to the water—mere
steps really—the resort’s 200 oceanfront guest rooms and suites are nestled into
two-story buildings more like classic
seafront residences than the contemporary condominiums dominating so much
of Florida’s shoreline today.
Herbert Strong constructed the course to be a stern test, one
that jutted its chin and invited the best in the world to take a swing. In its
first decade, Ponte Vedra’s Ocean course was commonly ranked alongside the very
tall oaks of American golf design—Pebble Beach,
Oakmont, Pine
Valley—and considered among
the hardest courses in the country.
So quickly did its star rise that in 1939, 10 years after
opening, the Ocean was tabbed to host a Ryder Cup. Fate took Strong’s new layout
in a different direction, however, as the impending war cancelled transatlantic
sporting events. During the World War II, the resort was redeployed as a USO
site. In the years following, a young Robert Trent Jones Sr. was summoned to
redesign the course, with an eye toward making it less severe for the
recreational amateur.
What grew out of this redesign is the heart of the current
layout, an expansive, unpredictable route that wends through a circuit of
lagoons created many years earlier, when waterways filled the deep pits of the
old mining operation. Eleven holes bring water into play, including the par-3
9th, reputed to be the first island-green hole in America. The
course, and its sister Lagoon layout (built in 1961), present the brackish water
of the lagoons as one challenge and the hulking, windblown presence of the ocean
as an equal pressure. While you never quite stand along the beach to tee off at
Ponte Vedra, whose shoreline is devoted to keeping guest lodgings luxuriously
close to the surf, you cannot play the course without continually adjusting to
ocean influences.
