Larry Packard: The Man Who Built Innisbrook

Larry Packard was 45 years old when he sat down to draw his first golf hole. He had already laid out airfields for the Army Corps of Engineers, planned park expansions for the Chicago Park District, and spent eight years working under Chicago architect Robert Bruce Harris. Golf came late, but it stuck. By the time he died in 2014 at the age of 101, in his apartment overlooking the resort he had built, his name was attached to more than 250 golf projects in a dozen countries.

Stymie carries 50 Packard layouts across 11 states, from Florida resort flagships to nine-hole municipal tracks in central Illinois. The earliest dates to 1958. The most recent opened in 1998. The thread running through all of them is a design idea simpler than anything you will read in a modern architecture text: make the golfer use every club in the bag, and let everyone go home happy.

From Westover Field to the Tee Box

Edward Lawrence Packard, known as Larry, graduated from the University of Massachusetts School of Landscape Architecture in 1935. The Depression sent him to the U.S. Department of the Interior, then the National Park Service, where he picked routes for new parks on Maine's Mount Desert Island. The war pulled him to Westover Field in western Massachusetts, where he ran landscape and camouflage planning for a $15 million air base and seeded 1,500 acres of grass.

That mix of military scale, agronomy, and route-finding is unusual training for a golf architect, and it shows in his work. Packard courses move earth efficiently. Drainage is taken seriously. Tee complexes and green pads sit where the land already wanted them. He preferred to use only a few water hazards, an old-fashioned restraint that aged well as maintenance budgets tightened.

Innisbrook and the Copperhead

In 1970, Packard was elected president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. He wore the red plaid ASGCA jacket from that year for the rest of his life. Four years later he routed the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook through the rolling pine sandhills of Palm Harbor, Florida, and gave American resort golf one of its most durable championship venues. The course has hosted a PGA Tour event every year since 2000, currently the Valspar Championship, and the closing three holes, known as the Snake Pit, have decided more tournaments than any other finish on the Florida Swing.

Packard designed all four Innisbrook layouts. The Island Course, the Highlands North, and the Highlands South share the Copperhead's elevation changes and pine-framed corridors but with friendlier scoring conditions. Two of the four sat in Golf Digest's national top 100 for stretches of the late 1970s and 1980s. Packard moved into Innisbrook's Turnberry complex around 1990 and lived on property for the last two decades of his life. The clubhouse steakhouse still bears his name.

The Chicago Practice

While Innisbrook brought Packard fame, the bulk of his work happened from a Chicago office that built dozens of municipal and country club courses across the upper Midwest. Elgin Country Club outside Chicago plays to a 142 slope from the back tees, the steepest of any layout he touched in our database. Echo Valley Country Club in Norwalk, Iowa stretches to 7,040 yards with a slope of 139. Cypress Run Golf Club in Tarpon Springs, ten minutes from Innisbrook, is the private companion to his resort work.

His son Roger took over the Chicago office in 1986 and the firm's later projects, including Cantigny Golf in Naperville and the East Course at Eagle Ridge in Galena, carry the Roger Packard or Packard family signature. The Eagle Ridge layouts pair Roger Packard with PGA Tour winner Andy North, a rare architect and player collaboration that holds up.

Easy Pars, Difficult Birdies

Asked late in life to summarize his philosophy, Packard kept giving the same answer in slightly different words. "I want him to use all the clubs in his bag. Every hole is different. Different length, different shape. This game is supposed to be fun." His firm's internal motto put it more sharply: easy pars, difficult birdies. Get the ball to the green with a putter still in your hand and you will be fine. Try to attack the flag and the slopes will find you.

That formula does not produce dramatic photographs. It does produce courses that members renew at, that municipalities can afford to maintain, and that occasionally swallow PGA Tour scorecards on Sunday afternoons. Six decades of layouts later, it has held up better than most.

View all courses by Larry Packard on Stymie