Pine Tree Golf Club

In the early 1960s, Dick Wilson was commissioned to fashion a challenging golf course at Boynton Beach on the southeast coast of Florida. The founder members of Pine Tree Golf Club gave Wilson a fairly unremarkable but large tract of dairy farmland to work with.

In 1962, just one year after opening, Pine Tree Golf Club hit the headlines after Ben Hogan declared that it was the greatest flat course in America. Since then, the club has gone from strength to strength.

More than forty years later, Pine Tree Golf Club remains prestigious, traditional and intensely private. Also, the course still represents a precise challenge and is considered to be one of Wilson’s finest designs.

Despite the flat topography it's a strategic test that asks serious questions of even the best golfers. Bold, irregularly shaped and thoughtfully positioned bunkers are the hallmark of the course.

Commenting in The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, Tom Doak asserts: “Pine Tree is the ultimate Dick Wilson layout – longer, flatter, more heavily bunkered and more difficult than most of his other courses.”

We recently ran into architect Ron Forse at Pine Tree and he told us that Forse Design has been working for Pine Tree since 1996. They used a number of Ben Hogan’s 1962 8x10 photos to “extremely accurately” restore all 130 bunkers (65 greenside 65 fairway). “Some bunkers [were] put back in, a couple put back into two after Joe Lee made them into one,” said Ron. “Hole 10 was totally reconstructed in the 1970s and we restored the original green complex but as a par 5 – it was a 4 in 1962. The big restoration construction went down in the summer of 1997.

In 2012 it was time to again restore the greenside bunkers as they wore out; the greens were rebuilt again in 2017 [with] minor surface tweaks in a few spots only. No plans of the course exist... that we know of. But a 1965 aerial photo was perfect for restoring features. Eye level photos and the aerial made for precise tools for our work. Another architect redid the fairway bunkers in 2005. We will restore these and tweak paths and landscaping in our current Master Plan Update, being designed now.”