Gary Player: The Black Knight's American Design Legacy

Gary Player won nine major championships and traveled an estimated 28 million air kilometers in his playing career. The South African Hall of Famer, one of only five golfers to complete the career Grand Slam, could have retired to a quiet life of exhibition matches. Instead, in the early 1980s, he turned a sideline interest into Gary Player Design, the firm that has now built courses on every habitable continent.

Stymie lists 40 American courses bearing Player's name, spread across 18 states from California to Connecticut, with work spanning from the early 1970s through 2003. That output makes Player one of the most prolific player-architects of the modern era, comparable in volume to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, the two men who made up the Big Three with him in the 1960s.

A second career, built deliberately

Player's path into design was unusually patient. He started as a consultant in South Africa and Zimbabwe in the 1960s, working with Sid Brews and Dr. Van Vincent. In the early 1970s he partnered with the American architects Ron Kirby and Arthur Davis, building experience without yet owning the work. A two-year run with Karl Litten followed in 1987, and only then did Player launch Gary Player Design Co. out of southern Florida.

That late start mattered. By the time Player was attaching his own name to American courses in the late 1980s and 1990s, he had already absorbed a generation of design thinking from architects who shaped the modern game. His firm grew accordingly. Today Jeff Lawrence and Steven McFarlane handle most of the design heavy lifting, with McFarlane responsible for signature work alongside Player across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Central America.

The design philosophy

Player has been explicit about what he wants from a golf course. "It is always my objective to work as much as possible with the natural topography, environment and features of the site," he told one interviewer, framing his approach as one of restraint rather than imposition. The goal, he has said, is "to create beauty and harmony and a playable golf course, whilst respecting a developer's objectives."

That balancing act, beauty plus playability plus commercial reality, runs through his American portfolio. Player has also been one of golf's loudest voices for fitness, walkability, and environmental stewardship, themes that show up in his courses through routings that favor walkers and bunker schemes that reward strategy over brute distance.

The notable American courses

Player's most demanding American course on Stymie is Manhattan Woods Golf Club in West Nyack, New York, a 1998 private club that stretches to 7,109 yards with a slope of 151 from the tips. It is a course built for accomplished players, and its proximity to New York City has made it a favorite of tour professionals looking for a serious test.

Just up the road in Bedford Hills, GlenArbor Golf Club (1996) reaches 6,933 yards with a slope of 140, another Player design that has become part of the metropolitan New York private golf landscape. In Pennsylvania, Diamond Run Golf Club outside Pittsburgh plays to a slope of 148, while the more recent Ace Club in Lafayette Hill (2003) sits among his last American projects.

Resort and daily-fee golfers know Player's work too. The Player Course at Geneva National in Wisconsin is part of the unusual 54-hole property that also features Palmer and Trevino designs, a literal Big Three reunion in southern Wisconsin. In Florida, Baytree National in Melbourne has been a Space Coast staple since 1994. The 27-hole Steele Canyon property in Jamul, California gives Player three nine-hole loops to work with in San Diego County's east hills.

His earlier American work shows up in places like Bent Creek Golf Course in Gatlinburg, Tennessee (1972), one of his first stateside designs, and Blackmoor Golf Club in the Myrtle Beach area, a 1990 public design that remains in heavy daily-fee rotation.

The legacy

Gary Player's American courses are not concentrated in any one market. The 18 states on Stymie include Hawaii and Alaska, the Carolinas, the Midwest, and the desert Southwest. That geographic spread reflects the way Player approached the business: as a globally branded design practice that took commissions where good land and willing developers met, rather than as a regional specialist.

Player himself has said the satisfaction of design outlasts the satisfaction of competition. "I get a great kick out of knowing that hundreds of years after people have long forgotten me, the courses with which we have been involved will continue to give people tremendous pleasure." With 40 American courses still in play, that legacy looks secure.

View all courses by Gary Player on Stymie