Michael Jordan is creating his own private club in Hobe Sound, Fla., just steps away from the hotbed of private clubs in the Jupiter area. Now, Jordan has hired architect Bobby Weed to make the vision of Grove XXIII come to life.
Weed got his start working with Pete Dye on TPC Sawgrass, and he was eventually the PGA Tour's in-house designer for a decade. He's been out on his own for two decades, and he's hoping this is an opportunity to showcase the future of golf-course design.
“This project is an opportunity to update how architects provide all players with a fun and interesting challenge,” Weed said in a release. “It will be a course for tomorrow, a course with a refined edge.”
The club is named after the property's prior use as a citrus grove in the Sunshine State, with a routing designed to consider prevailing trade winds. A unique feature of the design is a crossover at the fifth and 14th holes, giving members a chance to skip from one nine-hole side to the other and still be able to finish a nine-hole round. The hole designs will be based on player data to suggest placement of hazards and risk-reward opportunities which account for modern equipment.
Continuous turf from tee to green will allow golfers to go from hole-to-hole easily, and some gentle earth-moving should bring some dimension to the Florida golf experience. The greens will have a low profile with tight turf cut to allow for short-game imagination. Native grasses, shrubs and other plantings will create a distinct environment for the course, which is expected to open in 2019.
The course was first rumored in 2016, suggested that the club was born out of Jordan's desire to shape a club culture how he perceives it should be. Original reporting suggested the course and facilities would cost approximately $20 million to build, on top of the cost to purchase the 227-acre plot of land.
