I’ve been fortunate enough to write about hundreds of golf course restorations and renovations. The best have been historically significant as courses were brought back to their Golden Age glory. Other layouts were overhauled with the intent to better serve modern players or modern budgets, often with no regard to the course’s pedigree. There’s a whole scale of work balancing what was and what will be, and there’s a wide range of how well such work has been carried out.
Now there’s one course up for renovation that hits close to home, because for many years it was my home. And if a recently announced proposal to lease Eglin Air Force Base’s Eagle golf course and surrounding property in the Florida Panhandle is executed with skill and historical intent, this little-known historical gem can again find itself honored among the best and most surprising courses in the golf-mad Sunshine State.
What became the Eagle was built by the noted design firm of Langford and Moreau, whose legacy has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years as several of the team’s courses have been restored to great acclaim. After years of hardcore golf architecture fans and Panhandle locals whispering about possibilities, the Eagle course is primed for such an opportunity.
Eglin’s Eagle Course, named for F-15 Eagle fighter jets but formerly known as the Old and even before that as Chicago Country Club of Valparaiso, was my home track during my high school years in Niceville, Florida. This sandy and hilly course – yes, hilly in Florida – sits just north across Choctawhatchee Bay from Destin and the current-day 30A race to overdevelop everything. The course is just a few miles from the runways of Eglin Air Force Base, home to all kinds of fighter planes and defense industries.
People speak all the time of golf courses with great bones, if only the right work was applied to restore them. It’s almost a cliché, serving as a built-in excuse for any golf course in bad shape. It’s no exaggeration to say Eglin’s Eagle Course is a mastodon of golf course bones. Its awe-inspiring set of golf holes has to great extent been buried under decades of neglect and even a series of well-intentioned but poorly executed renovations in which its incredible greens were reshaped and bunkers removed with no regard to original design intent. But the DNA is intact, and a return to its heritage is possible.
Eglin’s course was for decades known as one of the toughest layouts in the state. The land features more than 60 feet of elevation changes, the holes draped across a rollicking landscape that spirals toward a lake at the course’s center. Several times the course was home to the Armed Forces Golf Championship, which pits the best players from each branch of the military against each other. These were amateur champions and plus-handicaps who committed to serve their country, and none of them could regularly threaten par on the Eagle.
Think all of Florida is flat? Think again. The Eagle’s original par-4 18th hole (now the 17th) climbs more than 50 feet as it stretches 450 yards upward from the lake to a green that always seemed just out of reach. The original second hole (now No. 1) features 30-foot falloffs all the way down its right side. The original eighth hole (now No. 7) had a mechanized tow rope to help walking golfers climb to the green perched more than 40 feet above the fairway. The Eagle was a soaring beast in its day.
The bunkers would scare any golfer. When Pete Dye’s famously deep bunker on No. 16 of PGA West’s Stadium Course was revealed on television in the 1980s, the Eglin regulars wondered what all the fuss was about. The Eagle Course had several that were deeper, set at the base of steep hills with vertical faces from which escape typically involved playing out backward. By my time there in the 1980s and ’90s, the deepest traps often were in mediocre shape, making a recovery even more difficult.
Most of the Eagle sits on beautiful sand, which drains quickly and provides a fast and firm playing surface when maintained properly. Any restoration or renovation will be able to take advantage of the sand, which makes the most highly regarded modern architects salivate when considering sites. Even when it was in rough shape before a half-hearted renovation several decades ago, the Eagle stood out as a singular test in a state full of too-often-similar, resort-style golf holes.
Put together the hills, the bunkers, the bold greens and the sandy soil, and Eglin’s Eagle is a perfect candidate for a full historical restoration. I played it more than a thousand times, and I can remember every bunker, slope and strategic line as if I just climbed up the old 18th and into the clubhouse for a cold soda and a hot dog. If you’re an interested architect or developer, call me and I’ll boor you to sleep with a detailed hole-by-hole walk through.
The Eagle started life as a modest nine-hole layout in 1922, founded by a Chicago businessman named James Plew, whose last name still adorns buildings and a school in Niceville. Memberships were marketed especially to the Chicago elite whom Plew tried to attract to the Florida Panhandle.
Everything changed for the golf course in 1927, when design partners William Langford and Theodore Moreau were hired to design an 18-hole course on the site. The pair were the designers or renovators of hundreds of courses, many of them in the U.S. Midwest. Dozens of those courses are still in operation today, including layouts that appear among Golfweek’s Best course rankings such as Culver Academies in Indiana, Lawsonia Links in Wisconsin and Wakonda in Iowa.
Many of these layouts have been restored to their Langford and Moreau brilliance, which tends to feature deep bunkers with steep, grassed faces that establish strategic angles into compelling greens. Their work together in the 1920s and ’30s introduced golfers to increasingly bold shaping of golf holes as modern equipment was first applied to course architecture. With four courses carrying their names among Golfweek’s Best top 200 classic courses, they aren’t in the same class as Donald Ross or A.W. Tillinghast, but their efforts serve as an important bridge between courses built with mules and shovels to more modern layouts shaped with heavy earth-moving machinery.
In short, theirs are important courses. And now there’s a chance to restore one. Eglin, which acquired the course in 1949, has put out a request for proposal to overhaul the Eagle and surrounding land that until recently held a second course named the Falcon that has been shuttered. The speedy deadline for proposals is Sept. 19. The following is from the base’s announcement for a proposed lease to interested operators:
The Air Force Civil Engineer Center and the 96th Test Wing seek a public or private partner to lease and enhance Eglin’s golf course and surrounding property.
Through the Enhanced Use Lease Program, the Eglin proposal includes all or part of a 603-acre parcel for a golf course improvement project that includes financing, permitting, development, construction, ownership, maintenance and operations.
This opportunity is a dream for Langford and Moreau fans, including those who have formed a society that bears the architects’ names. Eglin’s course is especially ripe for a classic restoration because its features have been documented by decades of photography and resides in the memories of longterm fans of the course, yours truly included. There’s no telling at this point who might land the contract to lease the course, but if an interested party decides to invest in restoring the course to Langford and Moreau’s intent, it again can be like nothing seen anywhere else in Florida.
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