This article, first published in Global Golf Post on May 11, 2020, has been updated to coincide with this week’s George L. Coleman Invitational at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Florida.
There is so much to commend Seminole, a stylish and extremely under-the-radar golf club that is the site of this week’s George L. Coleman Amateur Invitational Tournament. Located in Juno Beach, Florida, it boasts a top-notch Donald Ross course and a Spanish-style clubhouse that stands among the most celebrated in the game. As for the spacious men’s locker room, with its high, cedar-beamed ceiling and knotted-pine lockers, it is the gold standard for spaces of that sort.
Another thing that sets Seminole apart is its rich history. The club was the brainchild of New York City financier E.F. Hutton, who founded the fabled brokerage house of that name in 1904. By the time the Roaring ’20s kicked in, he had started wintering in nearby Palm Beach with his second wife, the General Foods heiress Marjorie Post, and in 1927 they commissioned architect Marion Sims Wyeth to design and then build the extravagant Gilded Age estate they came to call Mar-a-Lago. Today, that property is owned by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
An avid sportsman who loved fishing and yachting, Hutton also adored golf and became interested in starting his own club. Eventually, he purchased 140 acres full of swampland and sand dunes some 15 miles north of Palm Beach and then hired Ross to design a golf course on that land. Ross started that job in spring 1929, right after Seminole was incorporated, and the layout officially opened on January 1, 1930. Also ready to go at that time was the clubhouse, which like Mar-a-Lago had been designed by Wyeth.
Hutton’s hope was to make Seminole a place for golfers, and from the very beginning, the royal and ancient game has been the club’s main attraction. As one might expect, given the playground that Palm Beach had become for the rich and famous, the early rolls at Seminole were populated by some heavy hitters. Walter Chrysler (founder of the car company), Herbert “Tony” Pulitzer (son of newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer) and financier H.C. (for Henry Carnegie) Phipps were founding members, and they were joined in later years by the likes of Joseph P. Kennedy, Henry Ford II and the Duke of Windsor. Ben Hogan and Dwight Eisenhower became honorary members in the 1950s.
Equally as impressive was the group of professionals who have overseen the golf program at Seminole. A pair of top English golfers in Gil Nicholls and Wilfrid Reid were the first to run things, with Claude Harmon coming on board as head professional No. 3 in 1945. Harmon, the patriarch of a family that produced four professionals in sons Butch, Billy, Dick and Craig, worked winters at Seminole until 1957 while also spending his summer seasons at Winged Foot Golf Club in New York. During his time in Juno Beach, he captured the 1948 Masters and to this day remains the last club professional to take a major championship.
Henry Picard, winner of the 1938 Masters and the 1939 PGA Championship, took over for Harmon. It seems likely that his hiring was helped by a recommendation by Hogan, whose career was in many ways salvaged in the late 1930s when Picard got him to weaken his grip so he could rid himself of a horrible hook. Later, Picard recommended that Hogan replace him as the head golf professional at Hershey (Pennsylvania) Country Club, which his old friend was able to do.
Then in 1973, Seminole turned to Jerry Pittman, an Oklahoma native who learned the game as a caddie at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa and got to be a good enough player to earn a golf scholarship to Southern Methodist University. He competed on the PGA Tour for a spell before moving to the club world, holding the head job at the Creek Club on Long Island before going to work at Seminole.
Pittman retired in 2000 and was succeeded by Bob Ford, who had established himself as one of the best head professionals in golf history at Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh. He held down the top job at both places for 16 years, at which point he retired from Oakmont and began working exclusively at Seminole.
The winner in 2017 of the prestigious Bob Jones Award, the USGA’s highest honor, Ford has qualified for 15 major championships and been named the PGA of America’s Professional of the Year and its Club Professional of the Year. Ford is also an unparalleled merchandiser and has seen dozens of his former assistants assume head jobs at other clubs. One of those assistants, Matt Cahill, succeeded Ford as head golf professional right after the club hosted the 2021 Walker Cup.
The Coleman, as the annual invitational tournament is familiarly known, is another unique feature of Seminole. Created in 1992 by former club president Barry van Gerbig and named after the longtime Seminole member who had hosted Ben and Valerie Hogan for each of their annual visits to the Palm Beach area in the 1950s and ’60s, it was designed to be, in van Gerbig’s words, “an event for great guys and great amateur players.” In time, the tournament became one of the most coveted invites in competitive golf – and one of the highlights of the mid-am and senior amateur circuits. It also has helped cement Seminole’s reputation as one of America’s great golf clubs.
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