Closer Look
The Park West Palm: Our drone tour of Gil Hanse’s new muny that will host The Match IX
When the latest installment of golf’s newest and most popular head-to-head match-play event, Capital One's The Match, tees off on Monday, it won’t be the first time the game is played on a public-access golf course.
It will be the first time it’s held on a course that most viewers might reasonably be able to play.
The Match IX, a 12-hole skins game format between Rory McIlroy, Max Homa, Lexi Thompson and Rose Zhang, will be held at The Park West Palm, a new community-oriented, municipally supported course that opened last spring. Built by Gil Hanse and partner Jim Wagner, two of the most acclaimed architects in the profession, along with colleague Dirk Ziff who created the routing, The Park sits atop the old Dick Wilson-designed West Palm Beach Golf Course that had admirably served area golfers since it opened in 1947.
The Park is more than just golf. The property is designed to attract Palm Beach residents of all ages and abilities with state-of-the-art practice facilities, a nine-hole lighted short course, a topsy-turvy putting course, junior caddie programs and a variety of off-course youth educational services.
Previous Match venues have included prestigious private courses like Medalist in Jupiter, Fla. (ranked 181st on America’s Second 100 Greatest Courses) and The Reserve at Moonlight Basin in Montana (No. 176), and resort courses that carry exclusive private club price tags like Shadow Creek (ranked 27th, $1,250) and Wynn Golf Club ($550-$750), both in Las Vegas. The Park offers city residents sub-$100 green fees depending on the day and time of year, and Florida and out-of-state players pay approximately $160 to $220. Local juniors (under 17) can play for just $20.
The Park’s wide fairways, firm turf and creatively contoured greens offer maximum fun and playability for a wide range of golfers, and it will be intriguing to watch whether the running 300-yard-plus drives of McIlroy and Homa overwhelm the open, sandy architecture or if the crafty greens and tricky hole locations demand equal measures of finesse and creativity.
Take a closer look at how this unique design can entertain everyday golfers as well as four of the world’s most skilled players.
In the current age of new elite private clubs and faraway destination resorts, the opening of a public municipal-affiliated golf course in an urban area is major news—especially when Tiger Woods shows up for the grand opening, like he did in March 2023. The Park is the latest in a growing trend of public/private partnerships that have fueled the redevelopment of numerous municipal courses around the country. The new course is set on the site of the former Dick Wilson-designed West Palm Beach Golf Course, one of the first notable designs of the post-World War II years when it opened in 1947 and long considered among the top municipal courses in the country. That course closed in 2018 due to deteriorating playability and diminished interest and sat fallow for several years. Several plans for different uses of the land were proposed before a group of local citizens, led in part by Seth Waugh, CEO of the PGA of America, raised $56 million in individual donations to re-imagine the property as a community gathering space with a number of amenities. Read Derek Duncan's full piece here.
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