The Loop

Frank Sinatra now has a golf course named after him...sort of

May 10, 2017
Dinner for the Dinah Shore Golf Classic - April 10, 1973

Ron Galella

Frank Sinatra’s golf pedigree is spotty, to say the least. He had a house on a golf course, Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He had a golf tournament, the Frank Sinatra Invitational, that lasted one year on the PGA Tour. But he did not have much of a golf game.

He was too impatient, his friend and long-time opening act, the comedian Tom Dreesen, once said. He’d hit the ball into the rough and “kick it back to the fairway,” Dreesen said. “Nice shot, Frank.”

And yet…

And yet now he has a golf course named after him, the Sinatra Resort and Country Club, though the new owner, Tim Martin, claims he did not name it after Frank Sinatra the singer, but after Frank Sinatra Drive, the street on which the entrance to the resort is located, according to this story by Larry Bohannan in the Desert Sun.

OK, then.

The Sinatra Resort and Country Club is the old Desert Island Golf and Country Club, a private equity club that Martin is turning into a resort that will include a hotel.

Why the name change? “We are basically rebranding the whole property,” Martin told Bohannan. “What I found out in talking with people was a majority of people didn’t know where Desert Island was.”

For the record, it’s on the corner of Frank Sinatra Drive and Bob Hope Drive, less than a mile east of Tamarisk.

We’ll give Martin this: Sinatra (Drive, not Frank) Resort will be more identifiable than Desert Island, notably in a desert that has golf courses called Desert Dunes, Desert Falls, Desert Horizons, Desert Princess and Desert Willow.