50th APDC

Newport Dunes

There are an estimated 40,000 golf courses on planet Earth— more than 300 of them thanks to the Arnold Palmer Design Company. This year marks 50 years of APDC helping to shape the game, and so we wanted to get back to the beginning, to when Palmer went from dominating courses to designing them. Turns out, he was almost always in the dirt

As Arnold Palmer told it, he was 3 years old when his father, Deacon, wrapped his young hands around a golf club, showed him how to grip it and said, “Don’t you ever change that.” Unknown is how old Palmer was when his dad wrapped his hands around a rake and set him to work on the course at Latrobe Country Club, where Deacon was superintendent and head pro—but one can guess it was around the same time. Palmer wrote that he used to ride on his dad’s lap on a tractor while Deacon mowed fairways, and that later, when he was in his teens, some LCC members warned him that the muscular physique he was building pushing heavy greens mowers would ruin his golf swing.

“As near as I can tell, it never did,” he wrote in A Golfer’s Life. “I simply wanted good hands like [my dad’s], the hands that shaped Latrobe Country Club.”

Palmer’s hands helped to shape LCC as well, and in 1972 they began to shape a lot more. That’s the year he and partner Ed Seay formed the Arnold Palmer Design Company (originally Palmer Course Design Company). The firm went on to build the first golf course in modern China and more than 300 others, and today it continues to champion Palmer’s outlook and spirit with a combination of respect for the land, love for the game, and a love of people. Almost anyone can have a good time on a Palmer course, but those who like to go for broke will find plenty of risk-reward options, just as Arnie wanted it.

“He enjoyed the process,” says Thad Layton, Senior Golf Course Architect and Vice President of APDC, who went to work for Palmer in 2000. “In the rough phase, at the very beginning, he trusted his architects, but as things went on he was the editor, he refined things, making sure certain pin positions were accessible from certain areas of the fairway, and fine tuning with the eye of a guy who could control his golf shot. But from playing with his friends at Latrobe Country Club and Bay Hill, he also understood how they hit their shots, and he considered that. Our clients love our golf courses because they’re so playable, for pros and for average players alike. Out of all of the PGA TOUR players who’ve thrown their hat into the ring on course design, I think Mr. Palmer got that more than anyone else in terms of making courses playable and beautiful.”

Brandon Johnson, APDC’s other Senior Golf Course Architect and Vice President, agrees completely. “He gave the architects freedom to explore ideas, but he was the great vision-setter. He was quite open and interested in new ideas and trends in design, but he had his vision. He was very heroic as a player and as a person, with that ‘go for it’ riskreward attitude, and I think that does come out in a lot of our work, in terms of how we hone-in on strategy.”

Palmer was intensely invested in his golf courses and in the experience of the people who would play them, both APDC architects confirm, and he took great pride in the efforts he and his team invested in creating golf courses of which his clients could be proud. As he put it, at the end of the day, “Everyone I built a course for thinks they have the best golf course in the world, and I’m very pleased and proud of that.”

Though APDC came just one year before Palmer’s final PGA TOUR victory (at the 1973 Bob Hope Desert Classic), course design hardly was some kind of retirement project. In fact, Palmer spent most of his young life working on a golf course, and he began shaping even before he turned pro.

Today, Cape May, New Jersey, is a charming tourist town. In 1951, however, it held a U.S. Coast Guard training base, where Yeoman Palmer built his first golf course. After being asked by his commanding officers to create a course, Palmer wrote, “I enthusiastically agreed to do the job and was summarily handed a rake and a shovel, placed in charge of an elderly hand-push mower, and directed to a weed-choked grassy patch of ground located between air runways.” The result: a then-beloved chip’n’putt.

Palmer had joined the Coast Guard after pausing his studies at Wake Forest University, following the unexpected death of his best friend and fellow WFU golfer Bud Worsham. Even at WFU Palmer had flirted with design, working with Worsham and the other team members to turn the school’s grass greens into “something that at least resembled a competitive putting surface,” he wrote. Cape May was a step forward, and there was more to come.

By 1963, Palmer was a six-time major champ and world famous, but he wasn’t satisfied with his seven victories in 20 starts and felt he was losing focus. That fall he returned home to Latrobe, where his father was starting work on the new nine at LCC. “Not surprisingly,” Palmer later recalled, “being the original hands-on boss, he did much of the manual labor and almost all of the design work himself.”

Always ready to put his shoulder to the task, Palmer picked up an axe and helped to build the new nine—and it turned out to be the therapeutic tonic he needed. “I suppose I was anxious to lend a helping hand, shaping some of the fairways and greens with a bulldozer,” he said.

“Latrobe Country Club is a really special place,” Layton told Kingdom some time ago. “It is a cozy course and you can see how it developed Mr. Palmer’s game... You need to be very accurate.”

The work Palmer did at LCC, and perhaps his early work at WFU and Cape May, informed his next venture, a proper 9-hole of his own design in 1964 at Indian Lake in Somerset, just 40 miles from Latrobe. From there, he was off and running, soon entering a work arrangement with Frank Duane, a former president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects and a respected designer. Duane worked out the designs and Palmer worked as the field supervisor and on-site consultant. Like Deacon, Palmer was hands-on, often climbing up in a bulldozer to move earth and shape courses himself. Projects built by the pair include Myrtle Beach National and the Bay Course at Kapalua, in Hawaii.

“Mr. Palmer was a field guy and he brought a very discerning eye as a player who won seven majors,” said Layton. “He wasn’t a big fan of things like propping up a bunker that is 50 yards short of the green so that it looks from a distance like it is right on the green. Especially for golfers who were playing one of his courses for the first time, he wanted it to be intuitive. He wanted golfers to know what they need to do with a shot.”

[Left] Ed Seay, Palmer and others working on Tralee; [Below] Deacon (left) and Palmer working on Latrobe Country Club’s second nine; [Opposite Top] Naples Lakes GC; [Opposite bottom] Thad Layton, Palmer and Brandon Johnson on site

Palmer refined his design sense with Duane, and rediscovered a devotion to classic course architecture. Among Palmer’s inspirations, he cited the work of Tillinghast, Ross and Mackenzie. Winged Foot, Merion, Oakmont and Brookline “were the Holy Grails of our design thinking,” Palmer wrote. “They were the kind of beautiful, honest, classically shaped layouts golfers of every skill level could appreciate and enjoy playing.”

In the late 1960s Duane was downshifting his career. Just about this time, in 1970, Palmer met Ed Seay at an exhibition match at Bermuda Run, which Seay had co-designed. Palmer liked what he saw, and six days later he had a new partner and friend for life. Together, the pair built more than 250 courses all over the world, including China’s first mainland golf course in 1981; The Tradition GC in La Quinta, California; The Palmer Ryder Cup course at the K Club in Ireland, on which the 2006 Ryder Cup was played; Kapalua Village Course, Maui, Hawaii; Old Tabby Links, Spring Island, South Carolina; and Tralee in Ireland.

To see evidence of Palmer’s and Seay’s touch, one can look to Bay Hill Club in Orlando, the host course of the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard. Palmer owned Bay Hill, of course, and with APDC located on site, the course received the best kind of attention.

“Once, Mr. Palmer was talking to us about Bay Hill and he told us he wanted the golf course to play like a U.S. Open off the tee and like Augusta around the greens,” Johnson told Kingdom. “Mr. Palmer had a knack for explaining things succinctly. For the U.S. Open he meant tight fairways and thick rough, and around Augusta’s greens you can find situations where it seems the ball is never going to stop rolling. He took two very different characteristics, brought them together to create something different, and for a course designer that gives you a lot of latitude on the one hand, while also setting you in a certain direction.”

Over its 50 years APDC has held a great deal of talent, including people like Erik Larsen; Vicki Martz; David Crouch; Eric Wiltse; Liz McCarthy; and others. Today, Layton and Johnson continue to champion Mr. Palmer’s approach and vision, bringing the expertise he trusted to new projects and renovations around the world.

“You’ll find him out there in our golf courses,” says Johnson. “The spirit of him as a player and as a person, that risk-reward aspect of the game; it’s there.”

Layton agrees: “The energy he brought when he set foot on a site, everything got ratcheted up. Everybody was trying to make him proud, to live up to that energy. Brandon and I continue to carry that torch and to put the same level of energy and care into every project. I never saw him as intimidating—but inspiring; someone you wanted to please, to make proud. He was going all-in and so you wanted to do the same. We work to that standard every day.”