Steve Battista has a lot of golf stories, most of which are true. That includes the one about the four golfers and the three bears. Two years ago, Battista was part of a foursome that encountered the threesome on the tenth green of Legacy at Alaqua Lakes, a private country club in Longwood. From beneath a stand of trees, roughly 20 yards from the green, a black bear and her two cubs watched that day as the golfers hit their approach shots, then tried their best to focus on their putts. “I think I missed mine and just picked up,” says Battista, president of Advanced Communication Systems in Lake Mary and an Alaqua Lakes resident and member. “We were all pretty nervous. Even the cubs could have taken us out if they’d wanted to.” On any given day, you might catch a glimpse of deer, gators, foxes, otters, hawks, pileated woodpeckers or wild turkeys on Legacy’s golf course. If not, there’s always the pro shop, where you’ll find their portraits hanging on the wall. The abundance of wildlife around the course is a source of pride to members and staffers, and a part of the identity of the club itself. Every country-club and golf-course community has a personality that overlaps with the course itself yet also stands apart. The atmosphere of the clubhouse, the lay of the land, the accidental extras: These are the elements, large and small, that we’re celebrating with our first annual 19th Hole Awards. Think of it as both a tribute and a picture-puzzle portrait of the variety and the vision involved in country-club living among the 100-odd clubs and courses in Central Florida. Surely, there are people and places we’ve overlooked. If you know of them, let me know at mmcleod@ohlmag.com.
Best View: One of the constants of golf is the view. Your game may desert you, but the sight of that cypress-fringed lake outside the clubhouse window never does. Of all the gorgeous visuals on display throughout Central Florida golf courses, there is one that rises, literally and figuratively, above the rest: The view from the elevated tee box on the 13th hole of Black Diamond Country Club in Citrus County. The tee itself is perched on a sharply-angled hillside that resembles an overgrown Mayan pyramid. The view straight ahead toward the green is across a 60-foot chasm, with a sheer white cliff on one side and random boulders strewn across a rough carpet of scrub brush below. The rawness of the chasm contrasts with the lushness elsewhere: a lake in the near distance, rimmed with flowering vines draped across another set of white cliffs, and beyond that, the precise green contours of the back nine, encircled by woods that stretch to the horizon. It’s an intoxicating sight, but with a primal aftertaste: If the druids played golf, this would be their favorite club. The course has a great backstory. It was built on a stretch of land that consisted of a grapefruit orchard, which was pretty enough, and an abandoned limestone quarry, which was not. Its developer was Stan Olsen, who owned a digital equipment business at the time and was considered by many in Citrus County to be an amiable lunatic when he bought the property and raved about its potential some 30 years ago. Now the raving is being done by publications like Golf Digest, which consistently ranks Black Diamond and its Nick Faldo-designed courses among the 100 best in the country. “I saw the beauty in the beast,” says Olsen, now 82. He’s not the only one.
Most Nature Friendly: Residents of Lake Nona Country Club, southwest of downtown Orlando, have grown accustomed to waking up to discover thinned hedges and missing flowers. Small clusters of deer have drifted through their neighborhood, grazing on the landscaping in the early morning hours. At Isleworth Country Club, an elegant oasis built among a chain of lakes, members occasionally have to brake for otters as they slip across the tree-lined streets, commuting from one watery playground to the next. At the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes resort, golfers can catch sight of a few of the dozen or so species of birds – from wood ducks to limpkins to great blue herons – that have been identified in and around the 18-hole course, or come back later to reel in a trophy largemouth bass on the 90-acre pond between the eighth and ninth hole. With environmental sensi-tivity in vogue, more and more courses have emphasized de-sign and maintenance strategies that preserve natural habitats. So this is a com-petitive category. Still. Bears. Legacy at Alaqua reels in the recognition as the most critter-friendly country club in Central Florida. It’s partly because it was one of the first area golf courses to be recognized as an Audubon Inter-national Certified Signature Sanctuary, partly because it sent us a picture of the four golfers and the three bears as proof of its wild-things detente, and partly because, in times like these, we see an optimistic moral in the story of the four golfers and the three bears: Sometimes you eat the bear. Sometimes the bear eats you. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, everybody just plays on through.
Best Swim Coach: As a boy, Dustin Dittmer made a vow. Thus was a dynasty born.
His father was the well-known Bishop Moore High School swim coach Dan Dittmer. The family lived in a house in Longwood. Next to that house was a parking lot. And right next to that parking lot was an Olympic-sized pool where generations of Orlando-area kids learned how to swim. Dustin got the same no-nonsense treatment as the rest of them. He hated it. “Dad would stand on the pool deck and yell. That was his coaching method. I always thought, if I ever get a chance to coach a swim team, I won’t do it like that. I’ll make it fun.” Thirty years later, Dustin has gotten that chance and made the most of it. He is the coach of the Tiger Sharks swim team at the Tuscawilla Country Club in Winter Springs, where he doesn’t pressure his students to perform, but slowly and slyly sells them on the notion that performing is fun. He doesn’t coach the team from the deck of the pool: He jumps into the water and coaxes them through their strokes, eye to eye. He makes practice and swim events social occasions, setting up a portable bar poolside so that parents can enjoy themselves during swim meets and practices. The approach seems to work out fairly well: For the past 11 years, in competitions with other area country-club swim teams, the Tiger Sharks have never been beaten. “I make it fun,” says Dittmer, who must have one of the longest commutes in Central Florida history. He lives in Switzerland, where he operates a business that manufactures orthopedic devices, and returns to Orlando every summer to coach. “I teach them, but I make it fun. And somehow, by the end of the year, without ever knowing it, they are jamming.” The team has grown so much in popularity and numbers – last year there were 120 swimmers, ages 5 to 15 – that Dittmer found himself in need of another assistant coach. And so, in a moment tinged with poetic justice and a touch of sweet revenge, he coaxed his 78-year-old father out of retirement and gave him the job. best club for horseplay A lot of country clubs have tried and failed to incorporate stables into the country-club environment. Both enterprises involve such high maintenance that it’s a challenge to make the chemistry of the match balance out. If there’s one place in Florida where it’s destined to work, it’s in Ocala, the heart of Marion County’s fabled horse country and home of the Golden Ocala Golf & Equestrian Club. The course was purchased, shut down and revamped several years ago by R.R. Roberts, who also owns one of the largest horse farms in the county. Golden Ocala features a stable, oak-shaded paddocks and winding riding trails that thread their way around the circumference of the course. Many a successful executive has lived out his latter days in a golf course community, and the stable at Golden Ocala has provided that lifestyle to at least one equine retiree. It is home to Galloping Grocer, a chestnut gelding who was once a Kentucky Derby contender. The horse was rescued, once his racing career was over, by Amanda Mitts and her husband, Nathan, an Ocala veterinarian.
Most Historic Homesite: Among all the fabulous celebrity mansions at Isleworth Country Club, there is a home with a pedigree none can match. It sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, on a shaded lakeside point that overlooks both the golf course and Lake Louise and figured in the lives of three successive generations of Orlando power couples. Seventy-five years ago, a cypress bungalow sat on the lot, home to a newly-wedded couple, Frank and Helen Chase. They were the last generation of a family that owned the surrounding property, a massive citrus grove ringed by five lakes that elevated winter temperatures just enough to protect the trees from freezes that killed off other groves. In 1984, the Chases sold the property to Arnold Palmer, who kept the lot for himself and his wife, Winnie, who lent her maiden name to the newly-platted street – Walzer Court. Years later the property was purchased by another Orlando power couple: Bob Vander Wiede and his wife, Cheri, daughter of Rich DeVos, the billionaire owner of the Orlando Magic. They raised five children in the 18,000-square-foot home, which has been listed in a Christie’s Great Estates brochure and features French Eclectic architecture, a private boat dock, coffered ceilings, cast stone embellishments and a three-bedroom, three-bath guest cottage.
Best Course Revival: Special “Rescue Me” award for saving a troubled course: to the individuals and agencies whose unlikely teamwork helped clean up Lake Fairview, widen I-4, make life easier for the Florida aquifer and beautify Dubsdread Golf Club.
“It was win-win all around,” says Steve Wiedenbeck, a project manager for capital improvements with the city of Orlando. For years, Dubsdread, one of the oldest golf clubs in the city, drew water from a deep well to water the course, then sent runoff filled with pollutants into the lake. The solution involved an assortment of agencies, from the St. Johns Water Management District, the Orlando Parks Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation, which had to solve its own runoff issue when it widened a stretch of 1-4 near Dubsdread. But it all came down to a single word: ponds. The agencies pooled money and resources to redesign the course and add 10 ponds to the landscape design. In one fell swoop, they beautified the course, cut down on the runoff to the lake and created a new source of water for hydrating the course, thus lessening the amount of water the course was drawing from the already overtaxed aquifer. One key figure in the equation was golf-course architect Mike Dasher, who had a short commute when he worked on the project: He lives near the Dubsdread’s 7th green.
Most Elusive Owner: Here’s what the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert said about writing: “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” Maybe Joe Lewis is a Flaubert fan. Chances are we’ll never know. Lewis never does interviews. He refuses to be photographed. But he is the most powerful figure in the glossy universe of Central Florida country clubs, not to mention points beyond. Time will tell, but Lewis is certainly positioned at this point to become the single most influential businessman in Orlando since Disney. But don’t expect to see any buildings named after him in the near future. Since 1992 he has been the principal owner of Orlando’s most prestigious country club: Isleworth. Four years later he bought what is now its most progressive one: Lake Nona. Both places bear the clear and undeniable imprint of the mind-set and personal tastes of the reclusive, 72-year-old Bahama-based British billionaire. You can reasonably assume he’s a Renaissance man, knowledgeable about both art and science. The art you can see at Isleworth in the form of eight monumental sculptures, stationed at strategic points around the course – the most prominent one being Arturo Di Modica’s 7,000-pound images of the Wall Street bull, stationed just outside the window of the country club’s restaurant. His interest in science, particularly biomedical research, is about to transform Orlando. It was Lewis who triggered and then helped orchestrate the 600-acre Medical City being developed in Lake Nona, featuring a hospital, a college of medicine and health sciences campus, two research centers and two medical centers. His most dramatic move was to donate a total of $15 million toward the development of the M.D.Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Central Florida medical school.
Best Business Model: The past few years have been perilous ones for golf course communities. Too many golf courses and too few golfers with too little money and too little time. Apparently, news of those dark economics and demographics have yet to reach Sumter County. That’s the home base for The Villages, a sprawling retirement community with 70,000 residents who played roughly 2,231,400 rounds of golf last year, losing an estimated 4 million balls in the process. They did this on the community’s 37 golf courses, which offer 441 holes of golf. Which apparently isn’t enough. “We just finished up adding 45 new holes of executive golf, and we’re in the middle of finalizing another phase,” says George Clifton, of the Clifton, Ezell & Clifton Golf Design Group. In these tough times, Clifton and his colleagues have maintained an enviable level of job security. They have been designing golf courses for the Villages since the mid-80s and expect to be busy putting in new ones for the next several years. “At the end of the day, we’ll have 621 holes of golf out here, which will make us the biggest golf community in the world, by far,” he says. And so, as golf courses elsewhere are plowed under to make way for condominiums, the golfing nirvana known as The Villages floats along unscathed in its personal snow globe of prosperity and happiness. Maybe the residents are ahead of the curve out there in Sumter County. Maybe they’re behind it. Doesn’t really matter which. It’s enough to put you in mind of a Mark Twain observation: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati. Because everything happens there 10 years later.” Here’s what we say: Hey, Villages. The ‘90s called. They want their boom back.
Most Glamorous Sibling Rivalr: The Tavistock Cup, a one-of-a-kind, members-only golf tournament, held in March, that pits the pro golfers of Isleworth against their counterparts at Lake Nona. Helicopters shuttle competitors back and forth to the courses. There’s an outlandish themed ball, as well, with lavish scenes and costumes in a mock-casino environment.
Best Country-Club Chef: Russell Scott, Isleworth chef, who competes internationally in high-profile chef competition – and occasionally uses members as guinea pigs in trying out competitive recipes.
Best Country-Club Mascot: Arnold Palmer’s golden retriever, Mulligan, who has the run of Palmer’s second-floor offices at Bay Hill’s Country Club. The presence of the dog – as well as its name – says volumes about Palmer’s own down-to-earth personality.
