The Wanamaker is the best PGA Golf Club course to play on a Florida golf vacation.
With all due respect to the FBR Open and the PODS Championship, the award for this year’s most bizarre-sounding PGA Tour event goes to this week’s Ginn sur Mer Classic at Tesoro. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
Tesoro is a private club, but the town of Port St. Lucie, where it’s located, is worth visiting on a Florida golf vacation because it’s also the home of the PGA Golf Club, owned by the PGA of America. (It couldn’t possibly have made sense to host the tournament there, could it? I guess Ginn pays better.)
PGA Golf Club has three fine golf courses that the public can play on a Florida golf vacation: two Tom Fazio layouts and a Pete Dye design. (The Jim Fazio-designed PGA Country Club is also there, but it’s private.)
The Dye Course is very good, but Fazio’s Ryder (formerly the North) and Wanamaker (formerly the South) courses are great. Of the two, the Wannamaker is our favorite by a whisker. It plays perhaps a stroke harder than the Ryder, mostly because of narrower fairways and more sharply sloping greens.
But, we prefer it for two other reasons. First, the Wanamaker Course’s holes allow for more strategic choices than those on the Ryder Course. The par fives are full of first- and second-shot options that can make the holes play completely differently from one day to the next. Its three short par fours, too, are anything but pushovers.
Second, it has superior aesthetics. Fazio differentiated his two courses in part on the basis of vegetation. In essence, he “decorated” the Wanamaker Course with native elements like wetlands, palm trees, and palmettos. Call us crazy, but we like when Florida golf courses look the part when we’re on a Florida golf vacation.
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