It’s rare in these divided times in America to find seemingly universal agreement when it comes to governance, but Florida residents sounded off loudly against a proposal to build golf courses in some of the Sunshine State’s revered parks.
And, in perhaps an even bigger surprise, the politicians listened.
A proposal dubbed the “Great Outdoors Initiative” by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to build golf courses, hotels and other so-called improvements on public land, including 45 holes at the environmentally sensitive Jonathan Dickinson State Park near Jupiter, was pulled after a resounding outcry.
In distancing himself from the plan, which had been crafted with no citizen input, Governor Ron DeSantis dismissed the idea in a news conference as “half-baked,” adding that it was “obviously a phony narrative” that the state parks were about to become “a big parking lot.”
According to an NBC News report, Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, both residents of southeast Florida near the Dickinson State Park, would have been involved in the design, said an attorney who represents Nicklaus. In an Associated Press report, the Folds of Honor charity, which has deep ties to the golf industry, stood to benefit from the initiative. READ MORE
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TAP-INS
The number of rounds played in the U.S. dipped in July, but the pace of play in 2024 remains on the rise, according to Golf Datatech’s latest National Rounds Played Report. Play fell 1.4 percent in July compared with the same month last year but still is up 1.3 percent for the first seven months of 2024 in relation to the same period in 2023, which was a record-setting year for participation. Notably, rounds played were off in July by 6.5 percent in Florida, which has the greatest number of courses in America and endured its third-hottest July on record, and by 4 percent in California, which has the second-largest number of courses and had its hottest month in 130 years of record-keeping, the NGF reported. READ MORE
Royal Dornoch Golf Club in Scotland will host the 2028 Curtis Cup, the R&A announced. The biennial series, which played its 43rd edition last week in Sunningdale, England, and will renew in 2026 at Bel-Air in Los Angeles California, pits the top amateur women from the U.S. against those from Great Britain and Ireland. READ MORE
The 2025 Junior PGA will be played at Purdue University’s Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex in West Lafayette, Indiana, the PGA of America announced. The tournament, which will feature 156 girls and 156 boys, will be played July 29-August 1. READ MORE
Compiled by Steve Harmon