“It doesn’t feel like Florida.”
Some version of this statement has been used to entice golfers to several of the Sunshine State’s highest-profile golf courses in recent years. But I never know quite what to make of it. It’s simultaneously a compliment and a slight to a state that, as I’ve learned in nearly a dozen years of residency, is so full of contradictions that it defies generalization.
One of the best things travel does is challenge and complicate one’s baked-in views of a place. It is not so much that High Grove Golf Club, Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner’s newest design in the Sunshine state, doesn’t feel like Florida. Rather, for those who are fortunate enough to visit it, it will challenge notions of what Florida – and specifically Florida golf – can be, in a form that may come to be known as one of its very best courses…