A Small Slice of Paradise
Rio Pinar Country Club and the beginings of Florida’s golf boom.
I can see Arnold Palmer arriving at Rio Pinar Country Club in a long red Cadillac. The clubhouse looks largely the same today as it did when it greeted contestants for the Florida Citrus Open from 1966 to 1978. In those days, the club hosted Palmer, Nicklaus, and Player, known as the “big three,” along with many other legends of the game each year. Today, Rio Pinar offers a glimpse into what golf was like in Florida when the state was on the verge of becoming the golf capital of the world.
Rio Pinar is a recollection of the time in which golf and television got married. The clothes were loud, the players had personality, and the courses they played were the playgrounds of the nuclear generation. When you arrive at Rio Pinar, pulling under the car park of the clubhouse, you can feel just like Palmer did in the prime of his career. You can step back into an era of the PGA Tour that most people can only see as a distant technicolor memory. The club has aged quite a bit since those golden days, but some of the old magic is still there.
Rio Pinar is from a generation of American golf courses that once were in the mainstream, but now find themselves as an affordable option found far from the “best of” lists. The game of golf has changed a lot since the heyday of the “big three” and places like Rio Pinar have in many ways been left behind. Courses like Rio Pinar don’t play long enough to host big-time golf tournaments anymore and they aren’t conditioned to rake in top dollar prices for play, but they still are popular grounds for golfers of all ages to learn and love the game.
For me, playing Rio Pinar was an investigation into how golf came to dominate the landscapes of my home state. Rio Pinar isn’t one of the oldest or most well-known courses on the peninsula, but it is certainly one that had a great deal of influence over how the game grew in Florida.
Rio Pinar Country Club
In the 1950s the State of Florida was booming. Cities like Orlando were beginning to see fast-paced levels of growth as people were moving to the Sunshine State from all across America. Florida was representative of the American dream. For a modest price anyone could move to a sunny place and enjoy the spoils of cul-de-sac living on the edge of suburbia. For many, part of that dream was a country club membership. Places like Rio Pinar Country Club were built to make that dream a reality.
Rio Pinar was founded in 1957 and is the centerpiece of the neighborhood that was built around it. The club is on the east side of Orlando and once was one of the premier private courses in the area. The course architect was Mark Mahannah who is attributed with designing numerous courses throughout Florida during the later half of the twentieth century. With an attractive course in a Florida boom town, Rio Pinar saw its membership and desirability rise for many years.
Rio Pinar is set in a neighborhood, but surprisingly the club is more surrounded with nature than with homes. Golf is one of the few games that can be experienced in harmony with nature. Many courses run afoul by trying to tame the wild beauty of their surroundings, but at Rio Pinar, golf and wildlife blend right in. At times the golf course feels like a wildlife preserve. There is a large variety of bird species and the many fox squirrels are an entertaining sight.
There is a distinct Florida feel to the course and club that is reminiscent of a postcard depiction of the state. Palm trees and lagoons dot the landscape and the clubhouse has a distinct mid-century feel to it. Rio Pinar is a brochure someone made to a get folks interested in buying a life in Florida.
It is not hard to imagine a large member gathering that resembles the cast of characters from the show Mad Men populating the clubhouse on a Saturday during the 1960’s. Today, that clubhouse is a popular spot for golfers to decompress after an enjoyable and affordable round of golf. Rio Pinar is now a semi-private club that is accessible for anyone to play.
Much like many mid-tier private clubs across America, Rio Pinar has struggled to retain its membership levels at where they need to be. The course is open to the public and in a place like Orlando where golf can be pricey, Rio Pinar is a great option for players seeking a unique experience on a budget. Rio Pinar offers an attractive blend of interesting golf, beautiful settings, and the designation of being a former host to the PGA Tour.
The Florida Citrus Open
The Clubhouse at Rio Pinar has a number of interesting displays that chronicle the years in which a PGA tour event was held at the club. The Florida Citrus Open represented an important development in Orlando’s history and today Rio Pinar keeps memories of the tournament alive through curated memorabilia in the clubhouse and pro-shop.
The Florida Citrus Open began as a wild idea by some Orlando community leaders, and it later evolved into what is now the Arnold Palmer Invitational which is one of the top events on tour. In 1966 the first Citrus Open was held at Rio Pinar. The event came to fruition after numerous members of the Orlando Junior Chamber of Commerce worked together to bring in Arnold Palmer for a fundraiser exhibition. Orlando was far from being on the golfing map, but Palmer took a liking to the organizers and the area. Within a couple of years and with some help from the King, the Florida Citrus Open was born.
Rio Pinar hosted the Citrus Open for a little over a decade. In that time span the tournament was a popular stop on the PGA Tour. Winners of the event included Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Hale Irwin, and Julius Boros, all of which are members of the World Golf Hall of Fame. Plaques commemorating each of these winners and the numerous other champions of the event sit just outside the pro-shop.
The Florida Citrus Open brought in the world’s best golfers to Orlando each year to compete for a winner’s check that peaked at $40,000 in the event’s final year at Rio Pinar. That prize money pails in comparison to the large sums available on tour today, but at the time it was a compelling reason for the game’s premier players to come to Orlando. The rich tradition of outstanding professional golf in Orlando began at the Citrus Open and now lives on at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
Arnold Palmer developed a special relationship with Orlando during his years playing in the Citrus Open. He loved the area so much that he purchased the Bay Hill Club and later made his home there. When Palmer won the Citrus Open in 1971 it was among his final wins on tour. Thanks to Palmer and others, the Citrus Open continued to gain in popularity through the 1970's, and in 1979 the PGA Tour moved the event to Arnold’s place at Bay Hill. Today that event honors the legacy of Arnold Palmer and his commitment to the game of golf and charities in the Orlando area.
During the years in which the Florida Citrus Open was hosted at Rio Pinar, the State of Florida was experiencing rapid growth. Orlando became an intensely popular area when the expansive Walt Disney World resort opened in 1971. Between Mickey Mouse and Arnold Palmer, the area had two of the world’s most famous spokespersons inviting the country to come for a visit.
Today, Florida has more golf courses than any state in America. Florida is also home to many dozens of PGA Tour players. Much of that is due to the ways in which Arnold Palmer portrayed his golfing life in Orlando.
Golf in Florida is a mixed bag. There are hundreds of well manicured country clubs and courses scattered throughout the state. The state even has four different PGA Tour tournaments each year. Some courses are better than others but there is a unique Florida feel to most of them. The majority are real estate related, many are set in beautiful natural surroundings, and there is always a new model entering the market to make the older courses someday face the fate of chasing discount golfers. At Rio Pinar, you can see those traces of Florida’s golf DNA.
The Florida Citrus Open and Rio Pinar were part of the push to populate central Florida with more tourists, more business, and certainly more golf. As more people came to the state to stay and play, more courses were needed to fulfill the demand of the growing American dream found in Florida. Golf’s evolution into a real estate venture can be largely traced to an epicenter in the Sunshine State. If not for the Citrus Open, golf in Florida might look very different today.
To the casual observer, Rio Pinar resembles the multitudes of Florida golf courses that were built across the state in the past sixty years. The course is pretty, the price is affordable, and the golf is entertaining on average. There is a bigger story at Rio Pinar though. Underneath all of the typical Florida golf trappings is a place that is indicative of how the state was sold to the world. Golf has long been part of the sales pitch in Florida, and like its contemporary courses, Rio Pinar is a small slice of paradise that anyone can afford to buy a life in.
