An Orlando golf week: Seven days, seven great golf courses

By Tim McDonald,
Contributor

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Grande Pines is the harder of the two Marriott courses in Orlando. (Tim McDOnald/GolfPublisher.com)

Orlando may be one of the world's most popular places for businesspeople slipping away from meetings to play golf. But let's say you're headed there for a week and you have an agreement with the family.

"You go to Disney World; I'm golfing. Here's my credit card. Leave me alone."

You can golf every day for a week and never run out of quality Orlando golf courses. Here is a weeklong itinerary for an Orlando golf vacation.

Day one

Mystic Dunes Golf Club: The greens are huge and wildly sloped and undulating. Approach shots are hazardous and tricky, and standing on the tee boxes can be disorienting. The conditioning is pristine, something locals say is a year-round deal.

The course slashes through the hills of a former orange grove and natural protected wetlands. The fairways bend, twist, shake, rattle and roll. Railroad-tie bunkers, some of them in the middle of the fairways, spice up the visuals and can swallow even well-struck drives.

Day two

Thirty-six holes at Grande Pines and Hawk's Landing: If you're doing a minitour of Orlando's Marriott golf, you can do it the easy way or you can do it the hard way. Or have it both ways.

Golf at the Marriott Orlando World Center Resort (easy) or tee it up at Grande Pines (hard), right down the street. The savvy golfer will use Hawk's Landing as a warm-up. Or maybe a cool-down.

Whereas Hawk's Landing is a resort course, with immaculate grooming and a player-friendly layout, Grande Pines might ruffle your feathered pillows if you're looking for an ego boost.

Grande Pines differs from Hawk's Landing both in visual appeal and challenge. It's 7,012 yards from the tips, compared to Hawk's Landing's 6,600 yards.

Whereas the fairways at Hawk's Landing are wide and inviting, with gentle mounding and little rough, you'll maybe find yourself hot and bothered standing on the tee box at Grande Pines.

Day three

Eagle Creek: This club, in the east Orlando master-planned community of the same name, is a combination of American and British architecture that turned out extremely well.

Combining elements of both styles, the designers put in the wide fairways of the United States and the bunkering of Europe, among other characteristics.

Lest this merger confuse you, the designers simplify it with wide fairways and generous landing areas, and not too much trouble in front of you. The course plays 7,198 yards from the back tees and has a slope rating of 128.

The owners clearly wanted something that would make this course stand out among the myriad Orlando golf courses, and so they built five par-5s. The closing hole was converted from a par-4 to a par-5 shortly after the initial work, thus making Eagle Creek the only par-73 in central Florida.

Day four

Falcon's Fire: A short drive away, in Kissimmee, Falcon's Fire Golf Club fits in with the Orlando golf scene: a semiprivate course that appeals especially to tourists looking for pristine conditions, Florida's wading birds and a layout that will let them brag to their friends back home.

It's a Rees Jones work that opened in 1993, and it shows his traditional values, very open in the interior and with inviting fairways.

Falcon's Fire, being a Florida golf course, has quite a bit of water, but much of it is out of play unless you're reckless. Some of the greens are set at angles to the fairways with water beside them, but there are no prodigious water carries off the tee, other than the risk-reward 13th, a dogleg right that wraps around a lake. That hole offers a safer route.

The slope rating of 125 from the back tees, at 6,901 yards, is an indication of how user-friendly the course is. In fact, the biggest hazard may be the wind that can sweep across the interior, which can mean a three-club difference.

Day five

Ridgewood Lakes is another short drive away, in Davenport. This is the course to save money on, as well as strokes.

Ridgewood Lakes is a player-friendly course with generous fairways.

It's 7,016 yards from the back tees and carries a slope rating of 135 from back there, but there are four sets of tees that go down to 5,217 yards.

One of the biggest challenges is sublimating your strength off the tee and stowing the driver. Many fairways run out of room if you don't shape your drive.

Ridgewood Lakes is an excellent alternative to higher-priced courses. Greens fees are in the $45 range, though you can play as cheaply as $25.

Day six

Southern Dunes: In Haines City, a short drive from Orlando, this course is a work of art by Steve Smyers, and it's no surprise his primary influences were the legendary golf architects of the 1920s and '30s, those who emphasized a risk-reward strategy, creative shot-making and bold design features.

The most striking design features of Southern Dunes are its bunkers, all 180 of them. They immediately catch your eye. They have red sand and are of every imaginable shape and size, yet never seem to be an overstatement.

Southern Dunes has plenty of bunkers, but you'll notice no water. Smyers is a big fan of the recovery shot, and so you will find no man-made lakes or ponds to artificially pretty up the layout.

The course is more than 7,200 yards from the back tees, with more than 100 feet of elevation changes. Southern Dunes sits atop a high sandy ride that juts across this part of the state, offering what views there are of this part of central Florida.

Day seven

Bay Hill Club and Lodge: You'll have to be sneaky on this one because you have to stay at the lodge to play on the course. Besides, what would a golf trip to Orlando be without playing its most well-known course?

Designed by Dick Wilson and opened in 1961, the course has been a PGA Tour (the Arnold Palmer Invitational) stop since 1979.

Bay Hill features flowing Bermuda fairways on all of its 27 holes (the actual tournament is held on the Challenger/Champion combination), and you can play where such luminaries as Phil Mickelson, Fred Couples, Ben Crenshaw, Tom Kite and Payne Stewart have won tournaments.

You also get your own forecaddie.

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June 5, 2007

Veteran golf writer Tim McDonald keeps one eye on the PGA Tour and another watching golf vacation hotspots and letting travelers in on the best place to vacation.