Dr. Philip Phillips grew more oranges than almost anyone alive. By the 1920s his groves and packinghouses had made him the citrus king of Orange County, Florida — the man whose name the whole district southwest of Orlando still carries. And when the land that is now Bay Hill came across his books, the citrus king passed on it. By the account of the people who later built there, the sandy shelf along the Butler Chain of Lakes was no good for oranges: too poor in nutrients, too quick to let the water drain away.
So for a long time it grew almost nothing. Then this rejected patch of grove country became one of the most famous addresses in American golf, the winter home of the man they called the King — and, like every square foot of manufactured Florida paradise, a place that lives and dies on a line it does not own.
The land even the citrus king couldn't use
Phillips ran an empire of citrus across Central Florida. When he eventually sold most of his holdings — much of it to Granada Groves, a Minute Maid subsidiary — he kept back the raw, unplanted ground, the pieces the groves had never taken. The Bay Hill tract was one of those pieces.
It wasn't ugly. It had natural rises and hollows, lakes, and streams feeding the Butler Chain. It simply would not do the one thing Orange County measured land by. In a county that was, at the time, essentially one enormous orange grove, this was ground with no obvious purpose.
Which is the quiet joke under everything that came after: the very qualities that made it worthless for citrus — the rolling sand, the standing water — are the exact things a golf architect dreams about.
A golf course goes where the oranges wouldn't
In 1959 two out-of-state men, Tom Barnes and Tom Dore, took an option on the land and set out to build a championship course on it. In September 1960 a group of businessmen from Nashville came in behind them, and construction began. In late 1961 the course opened.
Dick Wilson drew the first eighteen holes; Bob Simmons built them, laying down Tifway Bermuda across roughly 270 acres between the new community of Bay Hill and the Butler Chain water. The scrub that couldn't feed a single orange tree now held one of the most ambitious new golf courses in the state. It just needed someone to notice it.
The day the King shot 66
In 1965, promoters put together an exhibition match on the little-known Bay Hill course and invited the biggest names they could get: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Don Cherry, and Dave Ragan. Back then Sand Lake Road was still two lanes, and orange groves ran up to the edges of the property.
Palmer, the story goes, shot a 66 that afternoon — seven strokes clear of the field — and fell for the place on the spot. He liked the way it fit his eye: rugged, a little wild, quiet, full of water and birds. He was, by then, the first true superstar of television golf, a man whose whole appeal was command. He had found a course he wanted to command.
He had to have it
Wanting it and owning it took a while. In 1970 Palmer signed a five-year lease with an option to buy. In 1974 that option became ownership — some accounts say he had full control by 1975 — at a price reported just under five million dollars. He brought in the architect Ed Seay and reworked much of Dick Wilson's original design until most everyone simply called it a Palmer course.
What he built was a convincing version of control. Behind the gate: his own course, his own lodge, his own cooled and watered green world on the water, with his name over the whole of it. For a man who had spent his life bending golf courses to his will, Bay Hill was the last and largest of them — a place arranged, down to the grass, exactly the way he wanted it.
The one thing the King couldn't command
Except the current. Palmer could reshape a green, buy the club, raise the gate, and put his name on the sign. He could not make the place's electricity. It comes in from outside, along poles that cross the same flat country his course sits on — and everything that makes Bay Hill Bay Hill is downstream of those wires. The pumps. The irrigation. The air conditioning. The lights in the lodge.
The citrus king's bet was that the warmth would hold. The King of golf's was that the power would. In Central Florida, both are loans — and the weather keeps the right to call them in.
August 13, 2004
On the afternoon of August 13, 2004, the forecast tracks moved Hurricane Charley's eye right over Orlando. Orange County's chairman, Richard Crotty, put it plainly to his own residents: “We are the center of the bullseye.” The storm tore across the state and went through East Orlando still carrying wind gusts near 106 miles an hour.
When it passed, more than two million Florida customers were in the dark — about 502,000 of them served by Progress Energy alone. Across metro Orlando the outages ran for days; some communities nearby, like Altamonte Springs, went without power for as long as twelve days. Utilities warned that in the hardest-hit counties, restoration could take the rest of the month.
Palmer was seventy-four that summer, alive and still the owner of the place with his name on the gate. And the grid does not read the gate. Getting the lights back was not a problem any amount of money or design could solve ahead of time — it was crews on poles, spread thin across a broken region, and the most carefully built address behind the Bay Hill guardhouse waited on the same line as the oldest house on the oldest road nearby.
What's still here
Palmer died in 2016. The club passed to his daughter Amy and her husband, Roy Saunders, and the tournament still fills the course every March. The surrounding district is still called Dr. Phillips, after the citrus king — though the oranges he was famous for are long gone from it, chased out by development and freezes decades ago.
So two men made two bets on this corner of Florida. The citrus king bet the ground would grow fruit, and lost; he kept the useless piece and let it sit. The King of golf bet he could build a paradise on that same useless piece and run it on his own terms — and mostly won, except for the one thing neither of them could command. The land too poor for oranges is green now, greener than any grove. It is just still renting the one thing that keeps it that way.
