In the Beginning

By William Clay Ford

The beginnings of Jupiter Hills go back to a dinner conversation during the Bing Crosby pro-am tournament in early 1968.  Ever since 1953, Bing’s Clambake has been held on the Monterey Peninsula in Northern California, one of nature’s jewels, but a place with unpredictable weather.  That week, it was cold, damp and nasty, typical of the conditions during many of the Crosby tournaments, and we were to play a new course that was touted as another Cypress Point.  There was mud everywhere, so players were allowed a free drop- which is nice for scoring, but that’s not real golf.

My pro partner was George Fazio, who had won the Crosby in 1947, and was a longtime friend.  One night at dinner with Jimmy Demaret, Jackie Burke, and their partners, we were grousing about the conditions.  We must be crazy, some said, to play in lousy conditions with so many fair-weather spots around the country.  We ought to build our own course someplace sunny and warm, said George.  Where would you build it, I asked?  They all chimed in, and pretty soon we had covered the entire United States, beginning with San Diego and working our way around Texas, Arizona, the Midwest, the east and finally Florida.

“Florida’s been done”, I said. “Seminole’s been in existence for many years, and we aren’t going to top that.”  It was pleasant dinner conversation, but I didn’t take it seriously.

But George did.  I hadn’t heard from him for about ten months when, one day in Detroit, I received a call from him.  “I found the property we’re looking for,” George announced.  “What property, and who’s looking for it?” I asked.  I couldn’t remember the conversation and I sure couldn’t remember where it took place. George kept on: “You remember, that night with Demaret, when we planned to build our own golf course.”  “You mean that night out at Crosby?  I didn’t know you were serious,”  I said.

But, there was no harm in listening.  George explained that he had found a site in south-central Florida, and had an option on the property.  He wanted me to come down and look at it, I asked where it was, and he told me North Palm Beach near the ocean, on the southern end of Jonathan Dickinson State Park, bordering Martin Countyline Road.

As a kid, I had lived in Hobe Sound and was pretty familiar with the neighborhood.  The land was flat as a pancake, and there was no water other than the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway.  I wasn’t interested in building another flat, Florida golf course with palm trees.

But George wouldn’t let go.  He claimed the land wasn’t flat, and had plenty of water.  The terrain was rolling, and there was a big hill on one side.  He was very persistent.  George said he was putting together a group of investors and had only a few days left on his option.   He insisted that I come immediately.

So, I flew down and George met me at the airport.  We drove to Jonathan Dickinson Park, put on snake guards and jumped into a jeep.  We began driving through brush and thickets so wild you needed a machete to penetrate it.  Finally, we worked our way almost to the top of the hill where the clubhouse now stands.  All I could see was this awful looking scrubland.  I couldn’t envision anything beautiful coming from this.

“George, you have one nice hill here, and the elevation is terrific, but the rest is flat,” I said.  “What are you going to do with just one hill?”  George pointed out one or two ponds below us, and said he could expand those and lay out a golf course around the big hill.  There were smaller dune ridges and hollows, he said, which would add to the sense of elevation.  It would be different than anything else in Florida.  George was a good salesman.

His syndicate, mostly friends of his, included Bob Hope.  Everyone was going to put up $100,000 and George had worked out a land swap for the property.  He sounded pretty serious, so I asked if he intended to produce some drawings and layouts before they got into it big-time.  George agreed, so I went along with it.  I thought it might be just another dream, but it might be fun.

George proceeded to put together his syndicate and produced a design, which included all sorts of drawings, sketches, elevations and topographical stuff, which made no sense to me.  But George said it was going to be a great golf course, and I took his work for it.

In the early summer of 1969, George called me at my hone on Long Island and said he wanted to show me the layout of the course.  He had cut large models of the holes from plastic, which looked like a giant jigsaw puzzle.  He showed up with boxes of this stuff, and started unpacking it all over my living room, moving furniture so the pieces would fit.  It looked terrific, but after studying it for a while, I said: “George, I think people will score well on this course,”

George’s face fell, and he sputtered, “What d’you mean?”  I looked at the layout, then back to George: “You have a seventeen-hole golf course.”  My wife and kids came over to count them, and sure enough, there were seventeen holes.  It was very funny, and typical of Fazio; only George could do something like that.  He recovered pretty fast by saying it was just a detail; they would add a little par-three at the south end of the course.

And that’s how the present third hole came into being.  Later, when they were moving the dirt with bulldozers, they struck water there and ended up with a beautiful par-three with an island on it.  It’s a great little hole.

George was a dreamer and an experimenter.  He fooled around with the design, moving bunkers from one side of the fairway to the other, even moving some of the greens.  Jupiter Hills was a proving ground for many of his ideas.  Some of them were not so good, but a lot were terrific.

When I first played the course, I was super-critical of it.  In a way, this was as much my child as it was Fazio’s.  When you get in as deep as I was, you want it to be the best.  The fact that the U.S. Amateur was held at Jupiter Hills, and the fact that I have seen enough top-caliber players test the course -- and rave about it -- makes me think we have a pretty good course.

The more I play golf courses around the country, the more I appreciate what George created here.  The layout is marvelous, and it has so many wonderful and different holes.  The way George angled the greens is not really apparent until you have played the course and realize that, on some holes, there’s a difference of three full clubs in approaching the greens.

There’s a sense of serenity in playing Jupiter Hills because so many of the holes are entities unto themselves.  George understood that, and knew how to create that feeling.  He had a marvelous imagination, a wonderful feel for golf, and an absolute love of the game.

Nowadays, building golf courses is a cold-blooded business.  Jupiter Hills was a friendship deal, and it turned out to be fun.  When I think back on that dinner out at Pebble Beach, I have to smile.  From that casual conversation to the reality of Jupiter Hills was a totally unexpected journey.  Maybe George had something concrete in mind, but the rest of us were just shooting the breeze.  I remember George asking, “What do you think of the name Chip’n Dale for the golf course?”  Demaret with deadpan seriousness, took off on this, and had the rest of us rolling with laughter.

None of us had any idea that George was dreaming.  And that’s the way Jupiter Hills got started.