A week before Johnny Miller retires from the golf tournament broadcast booth, I had the opportunity to play one of the 17 layouts he designed. Harmony Preserve Golf Club is located smack in the middle of one of those golf communities that offers retirees an alternative to the massive Villages in central Florida, albeit on a much smaller scale (one golf course compared with The Villages’ 35). You can tell that considerable planning went into the development of Harmony Preserve, which is located pretty much in the Middle of Nowhere, Florida, between Orlando and Vero Beach. (One of the real estate sites pitching homes in Harmony indicates that the “Florida Mall is just 30 miles away.”)
Water is featured on every hole at Harmony Preserve, although forced carries are rare.
        A mix of single-family homes and townhouses, with a “town center” section just inside the gates, the community was designed to overcome its remote location with a basic array of services on site; actually very basic in that the “center” is just two blocks wide. By the looks of it, Harmony’s target audience is independent-minded retirees desirous of an active retirement at a fair cost. Homes start in the low $200s, and golf memberships are sharply priced beginning at $2,750 annually for as much golf as you want to play ($3,750 for unlimited play with a cart). You won’t do better than that at most nicely maintained golf clubs in Florida.
        What about the golf course? First of all, this is Florida and, therefore, don’t expect any dramatic contours from fairway to green that weren’t created by bulldozers. Those who want the occasional exercise of a good walk will find Harmony Preserve quite accommodating. Although there is a water feature on every hole, the fairways are quite generous; a few bunkers at greenside will give you pause as you prepare your approach shots. I found the greatest challenges of the golf course almost exclusively in the greens whose contours were sometimes obvious but, for the most part, subtle. This was my first round of the year, an excuse of sorts, but there is no excuse other than tricky greens for a half dozen three-putted greens.
Homes in the Harmony Preserve community are, for the most part, sited close together, but prices start at very reasonable levels, in the low $200s. Golf membership pricing is a bargain too.
        I understand from other reviews of Harmony that alligators keep a wary eye on golfers during the warmer months. On the coldish day we played, we didn’t see a one.
        I was expecting a golf course that reflected Johnny Miller’s personality, or at least the one he’s expressed on air for the last three decades. But Harmony Preserve, while a perfectly enjoyable experience, lacked much drama (except on some of those greens). Miller, like former PGA stars Gary Player and Greg Norman, seemed to overcompensate in his design for Harmony. (Player’s layout for The Cliffs at Mountain Park and Norman’s at The Reserve in Pawleys Island, both in South Carolina, do not reflect the bravado of their personalities, or the make or break style of their golf games back in their heydays.) That is not criticism; all these golf courses, located in areas frequented by golfing retirees, may not reflect their artists’ personalities, but they certainly will please their audiences.

Harmony Preserve
Harmony, FL

28 miles to Orlando International Airport
45 minutes to Melbourne, FL
55 minutes to Walt Disney World, Orlando

Homes from the low $200s
Sample home for sale: Click here

Golf course opened 2002, designed by Johnny Miller
7,428 yards from Miller tees, Rating 76.1, Slope 136
6,413 yards from White tees, Rating 71.1, Slope 126
5,408 yards from Red tees, Rating 65.9, Slope 114
Full golf memberships from $2,750 annually

If you would like more information on Harmony Preserve, or to arrange a visit, please contact us.

        We are in that season again, the one in which the mainstream media decides it has been a few months since they published its previous “golf is dead” article. The thesis always goes something like this: Golf courses are closing in record numbers because -- choose one or more of the following: a) a round of golf takes too long to play; b) young people (read “millennials”) are more interested in electronics than golf; c) the business model for a golf course/country club is flawed; you can’t make any money; or d) the pressure from developers to put houses where fairways once stood is too intense for flailing clubs to pass up.
        I know I am in the minority in believing golf does not need any structural changes – a round of 12 holes anyone? – to speed it up. My take is that it just needs players who are prepared to hit the ball as soon as their playing partners have hit; or we need to just chill out about the issue and understand that cutting a round of golf from 4 ½ hours to 4 means trimming less than two minutes per hole. Two minutes? Really?
        I am not sure which millennials disdain golf, but they aren’t those I know. Indeed, every year a millennial family friend heads to Myrtle Beach with a foursome of fellow millennials and asks me for golf course recommendations and dining options. They plan the following year’s trip right after the current one. My son, a millennial, and most of the junior and college golfers he competed against between 10 and 20 years ago, still play golf. Not all of them have made a career of golf, as Tim has, but they are still tightly connected to the game.
No matter the season, Caledonia Golf & Fish Club in Pawleys Island, SC, is always in peak shape, and the clubhouse restaurant is among the best anywhere.
        If you think golf course operations is a bad business model, try getting a tee time most any morning of the year on the day you want to play at Caledonia Golf & Fish Club in Pawleys Island, SC. The secret to success at Caledonia, where green fees are at the high end of all those in Myrtle Beach, is care and imagination. The open-to-the-public golf course is always in peak private-club condition, the food in the restaurant is consistently outstanding, with views to match, and extra touches like the dispensing at the first tee of fish chowder on a cold fall morning are memorable. Golf courses that fail tend to do so in a way restaurants and other businesses fail -- with poor attention to quality and a general lack of marketing imagination. The good ones thrive.
        Housing developers covet golf courses for home construction because the landscape is already pretty much prepared for them, keeping costs to a minimum. Across the country, residents and their lawyers are fighting back, and many are winning on the basis of a promise made by original developers that the golf course was a fundamental element of the community. Some original sales brochures that touted golf as the raison d’etre for the community have become Exhibit A in the attempt to convince courts that the implied contract to residents of a golf course supersedes a golf course owner’s right to sell his or her property to a developer.
        Overall, the issue of golf being under siege is overblown. Developers simply built too many golf courses in the 1980s and 1990s in order to sell houses (and sell a lifestyle dream as well). The number of golf courses will reach equilibrium with the number of golfers in the coming years. For the time being, we should consider it ironic that years after they used golf to sell homes, developers now want to build homes on those very same golf courses? This is less about any ebbing of golf’s popularity than it is about turning a quick buck.
        Golf courses will continue to close until their numbers are appropriate to the number of golfers with the time and desire to play a couple or three times a week. Here’s hoping that happens in the next few years; I am tired of dopey newspaper articles.