Golf Insider

As you may know from reading my blogs, I'm a big fan of municipal courses. Munis are an affordable way for the public to have access to golf.

I'm especially a fan of historic munis such as the West Palm Beach Municipal Golf Course. The course just had a grand reopening with none other than Arnold Palmer on hand to help in the celebration.

Palmer won the West Palm Beach Open in 1959 when the tournament was a regular stop on the PGA Tour. Palmer got a key to the city and city officials proclaimed Arnold Palmer Day.

The course, originally designed by Dick Wilson and opened in 1947, closed for seven months while Mark McCumber led the restoration team. McCumber, whose design credits include Bay Hill and The Blue Monster at Doral, did a number of things to restore the track to what Wilson had in mind when he originally designed it, such as removing thousands of trees and non-indigenous vegetation, re-grassing the whole course and adding white sand to fairway borders.

Palmer, for one, was pleased.

"It really does have the look of an old-style Florida course," Palmer told the Palm Beach Post.

"We wanted to put back into the ground what Dick Wilson had in his original design," McCumber told the paper.

The renovation was paid for by fees collected from the thousands who play at the popular course, which averages about 70,000 rounds a year. In the 1980s, Golf Digest included the track in its "Top 10 Public Courses in America."

The course opened Nov. 17, a day after the ceremony. For more information, call 561-822-1593.