Struggling golf courses continue to close. Here is a sampling of five in the American South.
• A pair of whiskey producers in Fort Worth, Texas wants to put one of the city’s oldest golf properties out of business.
Leonard Firestone and Troy Robertson, the owners of Firestone & Robertson Distilling Company, have agreed to buy Glen Garden Country Club, a 102-year-old venue that once claimed Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson as members. If the sale is consummated, F&R will build a visitors’ center and begin distilling bourbon and its award-winning blended whiskey on the property.
“In our business, having land is very important,” Firestone told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The sellers, Clarence Dowdy and Malcolm Tallmon, had hoped to sell Glen Garden to a group willing to maintain its John Bredemus-designed golf course.
• It appears that Hurricane Katrina will soon claim another victim.
Brechtel Park Golf Course, a municipal track in suburban New Orleans, Louisiana, was ravaged by the storms of 2005 and has been abandoned since 2011. The city says it’s “continuing to review options” regarding the 18-hole layout, but the New Orleans Advocate’s reporting indicates that it’ll eventually be “reborn as something different.”
The city had hoped to find an operator who’d reopen Brechtel, but the local private sector wasn’t convinced that that nearly 50-year-old track would ever turn a profit.
• Just days after its lender initiated foreclosure proceedings, a bankrupt country club in Jackson, Mississippi officially kicked the bucket.
Colonial Country Club, which had operated since 1946, was trapped between a rock and a hard place: too many competing courses and not enough golfers. “It used to be one of the busiest courses in the state,” one of the club’s employees told WAPT-TV. “I never thought it would come to this.”
• You can kiss goodbye to Deerfield Country Club. After a 50-year run, the club and its 18-hole, executive-length golf course in Deerfield Beach, Florida will make way for a technology park.
Gator Development Group sold the club last year, to a group that believes its business park will attract companies like Google and Amazon to Broward County, the South Florida Business Journal reported.
• In Elizabethtown, North Carolina, a golf course whose greens had been cooking in the summer sun has met its end.
Carolina Sands Golf Club, a 52-year-old venue owned by Don and April Britt, succumbed to the elements last month, after many of its customers departed for greener pastures. A foreclosure sale has taken place, according to the Fayette Observer, and a group of local residents has expressed an interest in the property.
One of the course’s former owners described some of the course’s greens as being “good,” others as “fair,” and a few as “really bad.”