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PGA National’s ‘The Match’ Course, With No Rough And Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Tee Complexes, Gets Set To Open

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PGA National, the Palm Beach Gardens destination where the PGA Tour’s Florida swing tees off in late February, now offers 99 holes of golf to play.   

Toronto’s Brookfield Asset Management, which purchased the resort and spa in late 2018, has bulked up the property’s pin flag bounty as part of a $100 million renovation spree. The Squire course which had been plagued by drainage issues has been completely re-modeled into a nine-hole par-3 pitch, punch and putt short-game spectacular which opened in July and a 5,841-yard 18-holer purpose built to facilitate match play which opens September 10th.

Golf aficionados have long been drawn to the home of the Honda Classic to brave the Champion course’s ‘Bear Trap,’ one of the most notorious stretches of golf on tour, but the resort also sees plenty of inexperienced players that would be far too intimidated to even step foot on the game’s equivalent of a double black diamond ski run. Both new golf amenities are aimed at capturing the large cohort of hotel guests just looking to get out there for either some hits and giggles or perhaps a spirited buck-a-hole alternate shot contest among friends or colleagues.

“By softening some of the golf offerings and stepping away from the traditional championship length play-from-the-tips mentality, we are able to attract and retain a different type of customer,” Jane Broderick, PGA National’s director of golf, says.

At the same time, while avid players will yearn to test their mettle on the other course offerings, they’re not going to want to miss out on these scintillating golf playgrounds either.

“We feel they’ll be extremely attractive to the golf buddy groups that come to the resort. We have these groups of 15, 20, or 24 guys that come and play three or four days of golf. They can play the Champion in the morning, have that eat their lunch, and then go out as a sixsome or eightsome on The Match, play a match play format, and just have fun,” Broderick adds.

Bump And Run

Landing on the short grass with a chance to make it to the green on your second shot puts golfers in a great mood and on The Match, the totality of the turf is cut to fairway height. There is zero club grabbing deep stuff on this Andy Staples design.

“First off, it’s a striking look when you walk around a golf course that has no rough. It feels tidy and upscale and it opens up all kinds of different angles and different strategies,” Staples says, emphasizing that the ground’s contours create loads of possibilities.

“You feel good about being in the short grass but that doesn’t mean you’re in the right spot. You still could be behind a feature or have a bad angle to the green. The ground game is number one and feeling good about the game of golf is number two. Nobody feels better than being in the fairway,” he adds.

A few other fringe benefits of nothing but short grass is no lost balls, much faster pace of play, and recovery shots on missed greens get a whole lot more interesting. You can choose to hit a wedge, 3-wood, or even a putter to bump the ball and get it running toward the cup.

“And when that ball gets up on the green you are going to see different places that you can use as backstops and funnels to the hole,” Staples says.

Trips to the beach are minimized too with only 16 traditional bunkers on the courses. Adhering to an old-school design aesthetic, there’s also a handful of inverted bunkers, so sand mounds instead of pits as well as dugout areas that look like they were previously bunkers but the Golf Gods decided to cut players some slack.

“I wanted to make it feel like it was a bunker and then someone just grassed it over like in the 1930s during the Great Depression,” Staples explains.

Another unique feature of The Match is instead of the tiered tee boxes you see on traditional golf courses, golfers choose their own adventure anywhere between a maximum and minimum marker that can vary a hole’s distance from 50 to 75 yards on up to 200 to 300 yards depending on its length.

An acolyte of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor’s classic designs from the 1910s and 1920s, Staples drew inspiration from the duo’s famed template holes when laying out The Match.  Golf architecture students will see a Redan hole, Biarritz hole (pictured), Alps hole and more as they wend their way around this track where everything old is new again. The exclusive Everglades Club is the closest Seth Raynor golf course in the area but unless you’re a member or a guest of one, good luck getting on.

“Some of the most famous private golf clubs have these features, and I hope that I give players a taste of that in a match play setting,” Staples says.

When they write new advertisements for PGA National, ‘test your Mettle on the Champion and get ready to place your bets on the Match’ sure has a nice ring.

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