“Let me tell you about the very richest,” says F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator in a famous short story. “They are different from you and me.”
For starters, they have a lot more money. They also play many more golf courses. Today that seems especially true.
If you’ve been following the golf market headlines, you’ve noticed the trend. At every turn in the news cycle, there seems to be another exclusive enclave in the making, catering to a small membership with dizzying invitations.
It is clear that there is a market for such projects.
There is also a place in golf publications for stories about them, offering a vague taste of playgrounds that most golfers will never see in person. But there comes a point when the public gets tired of hearing that it’s out of reach and starts thinking, how about reporting on a course where everyone can, you know, get a tee time?
Maybe that explains our best-read travel story of 2025.
The article describes the improbable arc of the Dunedin Golf Club, a Donald Ross design on Florida’s Gulf Coast just north of Tampa, born in the boom years of the 1920s, humbled by the Depression and reborn as a municipal course long before “muni” became a badge of honor. Along the way, it served as the headquarters of the PGA of America, hosted 18 consecutive Senior PGA Championships and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places even as it drifted from its Golden Age roots.
You can probably see where this is going. A $6 million restoration of Dunedin was completed earlier this year. Overseen by Ross expert Kris Spence, the work peeled back layers to reveal Ross’s original greens, routing and strategic intentions, returning the course to its age-old self. With the revival, Dunedin joined a short list of top-tier rejuvenated Florida munis, including Winter Park in Orlando and The Park at West Palm Beach.
That’s more like it, our audience seemed to say. If the story appealed to them, the green fees probably did too. They start at less than $100.
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