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| Best Practices: Property |
Master Strokes
Ian Keown
10/01/2005
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When Wayne Huizenga, founder of Waste Management and former CEO of
Blockbuster, wants to treat his friends Jack Welch, Greg Norman, Michael Douglas
and Catherine Zeta-Jones to a round of golf, he never has to wait for a tee time
or duck the paparazzi. Rather, he invites them to his private course, the
Floridian Golf and Yacht Club.
“Only 1 percent of 1 percent of the population could afford to buy it in
the
first place.” |
Huizenga is one of a select few who have
developed their own golf courses for informal games with family and friends or,
in some cases, to serve as sites for exclusive clubs that proffer membership to
acquaintances, colleagues and business associates. This past summer, Chicago
energy magnate and racecar owner Gerald Forsythe unveiled his 18-hole Canyata
Golf Course in Marshall, Ill. A yet-to-be-named personal course in Maryland will
be ready for play later this year for Albert L. Lord, chairman of Sallie Mae. In
Southampton, N.Y., Michael Pascucci, CEO of WLNY-TV, will soon debut his private
waterfront Sebonack Golf Club.
These are all 18-hole courses, but even golf
lovers with fewer than the 150 or so acres needed for tournament-style links are
joining this exclusive group. With a little ingenuity, many personal courses
have been fashioned to fit much smaller tracts, often in the owner’s backyard.
Some of these layouts consist of nine holes that are played front to back then
back to front; others have crisscross designs—a few greens with common fairways
and multiple tee locations so that each hole can be approached from several
directions.
The late Walter H. Annenberg, media mogul and U.S. ambassador to
Great Britain, entertained four presidents on his personal nine-hole course at
Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where one double green is played four times
during a single round. (The Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, has seven
double greens.) A few years ago, Jim Beightol, president of New Jersey–based
Wexford International, gave his wife, Dee, her own golf course for Christmas—two
greens and six tees on six acres of spare land behind his home in Mendham,
N.J.
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