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PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - As important as all-out power and bomb-and-gouge golf has become, straight-hitting Jim Furyk remains the only player to break 60 twice on the PGA Tour.
He owns rounds #1 and #22 on DataGolf.com's list of the best 18-hole performances since 1983: his second-round 59 in the 2013 BMW Championship at Conway Farms Golf Club (+13.09 Adjusted Strokes Gained) and his final-round 58 at the 2016 Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands (+10.66).
In other words, Furyk knows a thing or two about going low. And as he embarks on a new career in golf course design, the exhilaration of low scores is firmly in mind. So are the highest principles of golf course design.
“It’s been in my blood,” Furyk said of his fondness for classic architecture.
Growing up both in the greater Philadelphia area and western Pennsylvania has exposed him to several great golf courses from an early age. Chief among them: Lancaster Country Club, the William Flynn-designed gem where Furyk played some of his formative golf.
Now 56 years old, after playing professional golf virtually nonstop for 33 years and building a Hall-of-Fame-type resume, Furyk is embracing a shifting role in the game. After a couple of brief arm's-length dalliances with design in the early 2000s and a Recession-halted project in 2007, he has finally seized an opportunity to dive into design headlong in the last year.
“As I got older and my playing career started to wind down," he said, "it was something that I really had the time to dig in and get involved with."
To that end, Furyk teamed up with longtime friend and architect Michael Beebe to form Furyk Golf Design.
Based in Palm Coast, Fla., Beebe has put more than 40 years into the practice of golf course architecture and has been most active in the Sunshine State, first working with architect Charles Ankrom, then former PGA Tour player Mark McCumber before establishing his own practice in 1998. Courses Beebe has influenced include Osprey Cove in St. Marys, Ga.; the Golf Club at South Hampton in St. Augustine, Fla.; and GreyStone Golf Club in Dickson, Tenn., a daily-fee layout west of Nashville that ranked #19 on GolfPass' 2025 Golfers' Choice list of the Volunteer State's top golf courses.
Glynlea Country Club in Port St. Lucie, Fla., represents the debut new-build for Furyk Golf Design. Set at the heart of what will one day be a 3,000-home master-planned development called Wylder, Glynlea opened in September of 2025. It is a fairly typical Florida real estate development course - a spread-out routing on dead-flat land with homesites and water astride most holes - but with a higher level of design sophistication than most that have come before it. Furyk and Beebe crafted a nice set of 18 holes, with good variety of hole distances, lateral movement and green complex looks. There are five par 5s and five par 3s, and only twice do golfers play holes of the same par consecutively. Glynlea is public for the time being. As member rolls fill up and houses are erected, it will become a private club.
Furyk and Beebe clearly favor a relatively spare, uncluttered look and feel across the course itself - a thoughtful, no-nonsense approach that reflects both men's personalities. “You’re going to catch a lot of wind, so you’re going to see it’s relatively wide and playable off the tee,” Furyk said. “You’re going to see a lot of short grass around the greens to create options. Your average player, your beginning golfer, is going to putt a lot from off the greens. Your stronger player is going to use a wedge and you’ll have shots in between.”
Corridors that are slightly broader than usual for community courses accommodate generous fairways that have a slightly convex overall feel. Glynlea exhibits little in the way of exterior shaping or containment mounding. Still, as with all Florida courses built on dead-flat sites, several acres of lakes needed to be dug to produce fill and contain runoff, but Furyk and Beebe excelled at minimizing forced carries at Glynlea. There is always the opportunity to play prudently, especially from shorter tees.
"We tried to create a lot of options, a lot of angles," Furyk said. "As the tees move forward on the doglegs, you’re going to see the golf course become a little bit more mild, a little bit less forced carry, much straighter hole[s]. It’s not over-bunkered but they’re put in very strategic spots to make the player think. And then the greens have a little bit of character, and there’s some slope in them, and some undulation. What we were trying to create was a fun golf course for all levels of play."
With most residents and members coming from the 55-and-over set, Glynlea (pronounced 'glin-LEE-uh') tips out at just over 6,800 yards, with tees that range as short as 4,249 yards for those that desire them. At just 295 yards from the tips, the 6th is a bona fide drivable par 4 for virtually all players, with a shallow, two-level green that is open in front but curls around a front-left bunker to accommodate spicier hole locations. The three par 3s on the back nine are fun, too; numbers 13 and 15 are on the shorter side, with well-bunkered greens, while the bunkerless 17th sits beside wetland preserve, with a meandering green that shrugs marginal approaches off into surrounding short-grass collection areas. It is a nice reminder that compelling golf holes don't need to be overly flashy.
“We took the land we had and tried to build the best golf course we possibly could," Furyk said.
What's next for Furyk Golf Design?
In addition to Glynlea, Furyk and Beebe have completed a renovation of Glen Kernan, a private golf club in Jacksonville. Glen Kernan counts several touring pros, including Furyk himself, among its membership, so the goal was to add some much-needed flexibility to the design while updating its look.
“We brought everything down,” Furyk said, noting that Glen Kernan was originally built in the shaping-happy 1990s. He and Beebe lowered the elevations of tee boxes and knocked down containment mounding that obstructed views across the property. Similar to Glynlea, Furyk and Beebe maximized short grass around the greens for the sake of short-game options.
Furyk was influenced by memories of playing Glen Kernan with his parents, including his father Mike, a long-time PGA professional. But he noted the importance of forward tees that could enable golfers like his mother to get the ball around, too. He and Beebe added more than 400 yards to the tips at Glen Kernan, but they also pushed the forward tees some 500 yards shorter.
Now, Furyk and Beebe are turning their attention to their next project, a rebuild and renovation of Treasure Cay, a course on Abaco in the Bahamas that was destroyed by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. It was one of the final courses designed by mid-century architect Dick Wilson, and finished by Joe Lee after Wilson’s death. Furyk looks forward to embarking on that project in 2026 on behalf of GreenPointe Holdings, which also owns Glynlea.
“It’s become a little bit more of a blank slate, but I think our style lends itself to having a little bit of those Dick Wilson traits,” Furyk said. “He was a master at laying out golf courses – you think of Doral and Bay Hill and the angles that you hit. That’s a little bit in our wheelhouse, and I think there’ll be some similarities.”
“I’m so excited about the project,” Furyk continued. “I think it’s got some really unique character and we’re going to try to bring an old-school look from the 1900s.” He hopes construction will begin in 2026 ahead of a 2027 reopening.
Furyk's long playing career and reputation in golf has given him the luxury of taking his time in his budding golf design career. "I don’t want to load up with four projects at a time,” he said, preferring to work on no more than one or two courses simultaneously going forward. “Two is a good number. I can still play a little bit here and there and spend a lot of time on [course] construction.”
Comments (1)
Nice article.
It looks to me as though Mr. Furyk, who likely has not had formal training (academically), regardless is going about course design the right way–as many former touring pros have done–by relying to some extent upon an expert who does. His comments show an open-mindedness and a sense of humility about the challenges inherent in golf course architecture. I’ve played a few courses recently where the designers seemed to have possessed Furyk and Beebe’s “no-nonsense” approach (and are somewhat minimal in certain respects), and these layouts seem the better for it. Also, what Furyk is saying also suggests a depth of understanding about what is important today in golf course design. The fact that he’s working–quite analytically–on a flat piece of terrain at Glynlea, where it’s tougher to create really good but playable courses, shows his commitment, in part, to many of the principles that make for a good design anywhere.