Arnold Palmer: The King Who Built Courses to Match His Game

The King's Other Career

Arnold Palmer won seven major championships, attracted an army of fans, and turned professional golf into a mainstream American sport. He was also a golf course architect for more than six decades, and he brought the same instincts to design that made him the most exciting player of his era. Today, with 300-plus courses across the globe and 69 documented on Stymie spanning 27 states, his design legacy is as wide-ranging as his playing one.

Roots in Latrobe

Palmer's relationship with golf course construction started before he ever turned professional. He grew up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where his father Deacon was the groundskeeper and head professional at Latrobe Country Club. The young Arnold spent years learning the club's terrain and helped build and maintain its fairways. In his sophomore year at Wake Forest University, Palmer and his golf teammates built the college's first grass greens to replace the original sand surfaces, earning 50 cents an hour for the work.

After leaving Wake Forest following the death of his close friend Bud Worsham, Palmer joined the Coast Guard. While stationed at Cape May, New Jersey, his commanding officer asked him to build a golf course on the base. Handed a rake and a shovel and directed to a weed-covered patch of ground between runways, Palmer constructed a nine-hole layout himself in the summer of 1951. It was his first completed course, and he called it the most physically exhausting thing he ever built.

A Philosophy Rooted in Aggression and Access

In 1972, Palmer teamed with architect Ed Seay to form the Palmer Course Design Company in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Their partnership spanned three decades and produced hundreds of courses together. When Seay died in 2007, the company moved to Orlando and was renamed the Arnold Palmer Design Company, continuing under senior architects Thad Layton and Brandon Johnson.

Palmer's design philosophy reflected his playing personality directly. He believed courses should reward aggressive players, incorporating risk-reward holes that tempt golfers to swing for the fences. His teams repeatedly cited his 1960 U.S. Open victory at Cherry Hills, where he drove the first green and shot 65 in the final round, as the model for how a well-designed hole should work: clear risk, clear reward, multiple outcomes for multiple choices. Fun was another stated priority. He believed that if a course wasn't genuinely enjoyable to play, everything else was secondary.

Kapalua and the Hawaii Work

Palmer's early resort design work is well represented in Hawaii. The Bay Course at Kapalua Golf Resort on Maui, opened in 1972, was one of the first courses he built as a design partner, and it helped establish the Kapalua resort as a destination for serious golfers. Three years later he added the Village Course at Kapalua (1975), routing it through the West Maui Mountains with fairways that work with the natural terrain rather than against it.

The Bay Course later hosted the PGA Tour's Kapalua International and helped put Maui resort golf on the map in the 1970s and 80s, long before the Plantation Course brought the Mercedes-Benz Championship there.

Tour-Level and Mountain Courses

Among his most demanding domestic designs, Cullasaja Club in the North Carolina mountains carries a slope rating of 152 and plays through some of the most rugged terrain in the Southern Appalachians. TPC Piper Glen in Charlotte (1987) was built to PGA Tour specifications and hosted the Vantage Championship on the Champions Tour for several years. Both courses show the range Palmer's firm operated across, from mountain escapes to tournament layouts.

In California, Tradition Golf Club in La Quinta has ranked among Golfweek's highest-rated Palmer designs, cited for strategic variety and a par-3 17th that exemplifies the risk-reward philosophy: elevated tees, water left, desert right, and a green you can reach or lay up from. Across the Southeast, courses like RiverTowne Country Club in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina (2002) and Brier Creek Country Club in Raleigh (2000) represent the suburban and resort-adjacent work the company was doing in the final decade of Palmer's active involvement.

Bay Hill and the Orlando Chapter

Bay Hill Club and Lodge in Orlando became Palmer's home base after he purchased it in 1976. Although the course was originally designed by Dick Wilson, Palmer reshaped it over the years and made it the permanent home of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, a PGA Tour stop that carries his name. It became the course most associated with his personal identity in the design world and the organizational hub of his company's later years.

A Legacy Still Active

Arnold Palmer died on September 25, 2016, but the Arnold Palmer Design Company continues under Layton and Johnson, carrying forward the design principles he instilled over six decades. His 69 courses on Stymie stretch from Florida to Hawaii, from North Carolina to Montana, representing work from 1953 through 2005. That range, across four decades of American golf development, reflects a career that was never confined to one region, one type of course, or one type of golfer.

Explore all of his courses on Stymie: View all courses by Arnold Palmer