The seaside Palm Beach Par-3 course was the site of a novel event this week.
courtesy Palm Beach Par-3
You want to talk about making golf more fun for more people? At the public Palm Beach Par-3 course on Thursday, there was a little afternoon golf tournament: 50 or so players, in foursomes (pretty much), each golfer carrying one club, each group a team, playing scramble golf.
With four tee shots per group, somebody’s bound to have a greenie, right? Then four stabs at the birdie putt, on the chance you needed four tries. Second putts, as needed. In other words, birdies and pars, pretty much, all the way around for almost every group.
Why should the high priests of golf, up the road at the Honda this week, have all the fun?
“We started at 3:10,” Sam Reeves, a member of the winning group, said in a post-round interview. “We finished at 4:43!”
The Reeves group was 13 under par.
Is this Palm Beach muni the best public par-3 course in the world?
Their scorecard:
233 333 222
222 222 222
Yep, 41.
OK, some bookkeeping, and some explanatory notes, are in order.
The Palm Beach Par-3, owned by the Town of Palm Beach, has a grass driving range and, in its elegant clubhouse, arguably the best sea-breeze pizza in South Florida. It sits smack-dab between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. Years ago, you used to see Jesper Parnevik and Chuck Will, a longtime CBS Sports producer, on the range there, working on punch shots and other bits of golfing craftiness. Will had a lot of game and Parnevik nearly won a British Open.
The wind comes at you every which way at the Palm Beach Par-3, so you better know how to keep your ball low. As for the 39-acre parcel on which the course sits, it has to be worth $1 billion. Of course, the real value to the town is incalculable. The Town of Palm Beach has enough oceanfront high rises. It has only one beloved golf course. The town’s soul is bound it in its course and driving range and restaurant. Come one, come all.
There’s no escaping the the wind at the Palm Beach Par-3.
courtesy Palm Beach Par-3
For everyday play, the holes range between 80 and 210 yards. But for the Thursday event the tees were moved up, to make the course more playable for golfers carrying one lonely club. The holes were mostly between 60 and 120 yards, with one 150-yarder. A tournament organizer thoughtfully left a single right-handed 7-iron on the tee of the that hole, for communal use.
The tournament was called Sam Dunes Classic, and it was a gathering in honor of the guy who was a member of the winning team, Sam Reeves. The tournament was really a party for Reeves, on the occasion of his 85th birthday. Reeves is 87.5. Covid delay.
Reeves winning his own event is sort of like Bobby Jones winning the Masters, which never happened, or Jack Nicklaus winning the Memorial, which did.
Also, the Reeves group had a ringer, Jay Haas, 68, a veteran of hundreds of tournaments on the PGA Tour and the Champions tour. Haas provided his group — and only his group — with some tips on how to putt with a wedge: open your stance, open the face, play the ball forward, catch the ball on its equator with the leading edge of the club.
“We never came close to making a bogey,” Reeves said. “On one hole we knocked it to three inches.” They kicked it on in.
Also, the Reeves group played the water holes with particular care. (The water being the ocean, the intracoastal and a dark pond.) The Reeves group, as it happened, did not have an extra ball. “We were like Steve Williams and Tiger, that time that Tiger was down to his last ball at Pebble,” Reeves said. Keeping your ball dry works at Pebble, at Augusta National — and at the Palm Beach Par-3, too.
Sam Reeves, right, with friend Laban Jackson at the Palm Beach Par-3 course this week.
courtesy sam reeves
Regular readers of this space might recognize the name Sam Reeves, a limber man with a rural south Georgia accent. Reeves made a fortune as a cotton merchant and has used his wealth and generous spirit in an ongoing effort to repair the world. He’s also a golf bum, despite his collection of cashmere hoodies.
In 2017, at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Reeves and Nick Watney made the 54-hole cut. Reeves was 82. Last year, he and the late Dick Ferris, playing tournament golf despite advanced ALS, won a three-day greater Pebble event called The Swallows. Reeves is showing some game, here in his 80s.
He’s funny. A few years ago, he and Jim “Bones” Mackay got paired together, by chance, at a member-guest tournament at Cypress Point, where Reeves is a longtime member. It’s a spectacularly beautiful course, the Pacific crashing beneath it.
“Take a picture,” Sam told Bones.
“Oh, yeah, for sure, I will,” Bones said.
“No. Take a picture. ‘Cause if you don’t play any good, you’ll never be back.”
Many accomplished people are drawn to Reeves for his insight and his humanity, and Reeves is drawn to anybody who is committed to excellence and trying to do something better. He counts Jose Maria Olazabal as a close friend, among many other well-known people from different walks of life.
Reeves, in his victor’s interview, talked about his longtime friend and golf teacher Butch Harmon. Harmon thought he could putt better in The Dunes with a 9-iron than a wedge, so he chose that for his one club.
“He only lost by four,” Reeves said.
Well, it’s hard to beat a team that signs for 41.
“Jay said he had never seen anything like it,” Reeves said of his team’s A player. The format, the winning scorecard, the team elder keeping it — all of it was unique.
Later, at a buffet supper, Reeves encouraged a group of gathered friends to be open to risk, and to keep reinvention alive. He could have been talking about a creative format for a golfing get-together, and maybe he was. But he surely meant more than that, too.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
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