Huge, if True

“What the hell is Tom Doak doing in Panama City?” I yelled from the couch on a chilly winter night. My wife shrugged and didn’t bother to answer. She couldn’t have cared less, but I was perplexed by a cryptic Instagram post made by golf’s most confidential architect. On January 23, 2023, he shared a photo of a beach sunset and hinted at a possible project in Northwest Florida—only an hour or so from my home in Tallahassee. The post felt like a challenge. I decided to get to the bottom of it.

The first step was to just start asking questions. Anyone could be a source of information. My first call was to a friend and true “Florida Man” who lives near the area where Doak had posted the photo and is always up to speed on the local golf gossip.

My friend, who for this story will be codenamed “Surfer Boy,” told me there had been some rumblings out there about Mike Keiser and his family searching for a project site, but we both felt like those whispers were a stretch. Bandon Dunes, Sand Valley, and now the Redneck Riviera? One of these things is not like the other! The idea of Dream Golf going to the birthplace of Girls Gone Wild seemed a bridge too far. He promised to keep asking around. I kept digging.

Despite having large sand deposits from ancient coastlines throughout its Panhandle and easy access to airports, Northwest Florida is mostly a golfing backwoods. There’s decent resort golf, but nothing that compares to the products Keiser and his sons have staked their reputation on. However, Doak’s mysterious post and Keiser’s track record of hiring him so often gave me reason to wonder if there might be some truth to the rumor. 

I decided to nudge the architecture sickos on the golfclubatlas.com message boards. I didn’t want to be too forward—that would scare off any good Intel. Instead, I started a thread about another project nearby: Davis Love III had just announced a new one in the Watersound community near Panama City. After a few posts about the lack of great golf in the area, I threw out a line about the rumors I was hearing about a significant new project on a sandy site. Of all people, Doak himself—a regular contributor there—gave me the nibble I was hoping for. 

“Might be something to those rumblings,” he replied. “Not sure how fast things will happen, though.” My eyes bulged and my heart started thumping. Something real was quietly cooking.

The next big break came when I mentioned my search to a friend in the surveying and engineering business. His company does work in the Panama City area so he typically knows when big land projects start moving. I shared the breadcrumbs I was following and he told me to give him a few days.

This friend, who we’ll call “Sandman,” dug into large-scale land purchases in the areas where he knew the biggest sand deposits were in the region. I was at work when a text popped: “Buzz me,” he wrote. “I found something.”

Sand Man discovered a massive tract of land that had recently been sold. Thousands of acres. And it just happened to be on a sand deposit 30 miles from the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport in Panama City. We found it! But upon closer look, the land seemed too large for a golf development, even for Mike Keiser. I made a note of the location and kept kicking the tires. 

Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville is a four-hour drive east from Panama City, but that’s basically down the street when it comes to well-heeled golfers in Florida. I told some of my connected friends out there to keep their ears to the ground about anything with Keiser, Doak and the Panhandle. Once again, my next clue came from one of the men I was hunting.

A buddy with the alias of “Tomahawk” called me to share that Keiser had just left the club. He was on a scouting mission to learn more about Timuquana’s recent grass renovation. TCC had deployed a breed of zoysia grasses for all their green surrounds and Keiser wanted to see how it was playing first-hand. Word around the club was he wanted to see if the grass would be a good fit for a project he was planning somewhere in Florida.

Tomahawk’s intel seemed to confirm my working hypothesis: Mike Keiser is coming to Florida and the likelihood of Panama City is strong.

Then, just like that, the trail went cold. Months went by and nothing new came up. I stirred up all my co-conspirators again. Surfer Boy, Sandman, and Tomahawk hadn’t heard a damn thing. There were only two possibilities in my mind: The Keisers had got cold feet or they had gone underground to dot the I’s and cross the T’s on the deal. Expecting the former and praying for the latter, I stayed patient. Weeks later, my journey came full circle. 

Late one night, while scrolling through Instagram on a spring break trip with my family, I saw a post from a creative professional who works primarily in golf. His IG story featured a photo that looked eerily similar to Doak’s original beach shot. The caption read, “Anyone know a good place to stay in Panama City, Florida?” 

I leapt up and pointed to my wife like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme from Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. She nodded politely and went back to her Netflix haze. I frantically sent my friend a direct message: “Does this have anything to do with Mike Kesier?” He texted back immediately and I knew I’d hit paydirt. It read, “Can you keep a secret?” 

This most important informant, codenamed Light Writer, shared just enough with me to tip the scale from rumor to fact. Dream Golf was indeed preparing to come to the Panhandle. The only thing holding back the public release was the local government approval process. 

Despite the money coming in from the post-pandemic tourism boom, the counties in Florida’s Panhandle are still quite rural. Large-scale new developments are generally feared by locals. I began watching the Washington County Commission agendas for the Dream Golf project. Sparks were sure to fly. 

Finally, this Fall, the wheels began to move. A 1,400-acre site plan that included a golf course landed on the planning commission agenda and eventually the County Commission. The local newspaper started snooping. Message boards and social media posts from local voters seemed antsy. I asked Sandman about the eventual vote and he responded, “You just never know in these parts of the world.”

The day of the vote coincided with my club’s member-guest tournament. While I was grinding over par putts, the Washington County Commission had bigger fish to fry. Local keyboard warriors lined up to speak against the project for its potential disruption to their rural lifestyle. One particular anti-golf voter, let’s call her Karen, said, “I’ve been on golf courses with my son. I know what goes on. They have little caddies out there all day serving alcohol to those people, so when you vote today, I want you to remember all of those little children in our community who go up and down those roads.”

But another speaker was on hand and able to share the virtues of a Dream Golf development: Michael Keiser, one of the brothers steering the future of the company. I chuckle thinking about what he may have encountered from the restless natives of Washington County. His testimony shined a positive light on the upsides of Dream Golf. And it worked: The vote passed 4-1.

In the process, a trove of documents were released publicly for the first time. Among them was a site plan including the first course. I studied the routing carefully and sure enough, it had a number of all-world short par 4s—a Doak calling card.

The soon-to-be resort, which I’ve codenamed Dogtrack Dunes for its proximity to a seedy greyhound racing facility, is now approved for construction and will hopefully be announced soon with traditional Dream Golf flair. That suspected Doak course appears to be on the docket first, and there is already gossip that another by some equally famous friends is on the way next. And there’s plenty of land to build even more. 

The case had been cracked. I texted my team of track hunters, thanked them for their help and closed with the most obvious but exciting thing I could say: “Our golf lives in the Panhandle will never be the same.”