Best golf courses near West Palm Beach, FL

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.”

Designed by Jack Nicklaus and John Sanford, the team responsible for Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in NYC and Naples Beach Hotel G.C., the new course at Banyan Cay replaces the old Presidents Country Club. The greens are undulating and often very quick. Surrounding the greens are large run-off areas to allow for either chipping or putting and large bunker complexes and greenside bunkers, including several U.K.-style pot bunkers with sod walls.

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.

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.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten: In 1972, architect Joe Lee was hired to create Banyan Golf Club, a private club on land in West Palm Beach that included 80 acres of abandoned shell-mine pits. Given the spoil mounds, the site offered elevations up to 36 feet (almost unheard of in south Florida) and several mining lakes, but it was almost barren of trees. Joe felt he needed a large number of trees to beautify the raw land, but the developer didn't have the budget for such an extravagance.   Then Joe heard that Interstate 95 would soon be pushed northward from West Palm Beach to Orlando, through forests of pine, cypress and oak. He arranged to have thousands of trees removed from the paths of advancing bulldozers and trucked to the Banyan construction site, where he would plant them along various holes.   Transplanting mature trees on a golf course is a common occurrence these days, although it is an expensive proposition. It was almost unheard of back in the early 1970s, as was the notion that one could get the trees for free. "We didn't have sophisticated tree-moving equipment they have nowadays," Joe recalled years later. "All we had was a flatbed truck and a crane. We didn't have time to prune and trim the branches back. We didn't have time to let them acclimate. We didn't even have a way to water them. He had to get in there, pull them out, haul them back, plant them and go back for more."   A lot of those trees didn't make it, but a lot of them did. Banyan opened in 1973 and within a few years, Banyan was a veritable tropical rainforest, each hole a secluded entity onto itself, framed by hardwoods salvaged from the freeway project and by more exotic varieties obtained elsewhere, like Brazilian peppers, acacia and melaleuca. Ironically, there are only three Banyan trees on the whole property. The owner just liked the name.   By the 1980s, the lush tropical canopies also began blocking much needed air and sunlight to tees and greens. Dan Jones, Banyan's superintendent at the time, instituted an aggressive program of tree-trimming and tree replacement. Out went the melaleucas and other exotics, in came fruit trees. Then came a tornado that wiped out 400 trees. That was followed by successive hurricanes, which knocked over hundreds more. But Banyan recovered and replanted again and again.   Today, Banyan is still a heavily treed golf course but now has far more palms than hardwoods, and more varieties common to south Florida. In 2012, John Sanford rebuilt the bunkers with grass faces, which was not really the style of Joe Lee, so in 2017, the bunkers were renovated again, this time by Kipp Schulties. But while Kipp's bunkers are of the flashed sand-type that Joe favored, the bunker shapes are now far more simplistic ovals than anything Joe ever built. Plus there are now acres of exposed sand under trees and around some tees, some of the sand covered in pine straw, some of it not.   I don't think it's what Joe wouldn't have advocated. Still, the basic routing has been preserved, which is good. Privately, Joe Lee had admitted to me that Banyan was his favorite design.