When Mike Davis announced in September 2020 his plan to retire as CEO of the U.S. Golf Association, he said he intended to launch a second career as a golf course architect and partner with Tom Fazio II. A little more than a year after he officially stepped down, those plans are coming to fruition with an ambitious project.
Davis and Fazio – who often goes by Tommy and is son of famed architect Tom Fazio – are set to embark on building the private Apogee Club, which will consist of three 18-hole courses in Hobe Sound in southeast Florida.
“I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. It’s 1,200 acres. It’s three 18-hole golf courses, it’s two short courses, it’s cottages. There’s no housing to it, so there’s not a real estate play. There’s one big practice range, almost 360 (degrees), and a performance center and another smaller practice range,” Davis said in a recent phone interview. “One of the courses is going to be designed by Gil Hanse, one designed by Kyle Phillips, and then Tommy Fazio and I are doing the third. But we’re overseeing the in-house construction, and I’ve been very involved with the permitting process.”
Davis said he’s been doodling golf courses since he was a kid and that during his tenure with the USGA he was a student of architecture, benefiting from staging championships and playing at most of the best courses around the planet. After the 2019 Presidents Cup, for instance, he toured New Zealand and played many of its esteemed layouts. Davis said he had a few different architects approach him about partnering, but the logistics seemed to work well with Fazio, who is based in nearby Jupiter, Florida, where Davis owns a home. (He and his wife rebuilt it since his retirement.)
Mike Davis (left) and Tom Fazio II have broke ground on an ambitious project named Apogee Club in Hobe Sound, Florida. (Courtesy Fazio-Davis)
“I knew Tom had skill sets that not only I don’t have, but I’ll probably never have, where he’s just spent his life building golf courses,” Davis said. “It’s just been fun coming up with the vision and then turning a vision into a master plan and then going from a master plan to literally finding the site, negotiating it, buying it, and just the whole thing, the permitting process. It’s been so much fun where even to retain Gil Hanse, to retain Kyle Phillips, to kind of master plan the property and say, OK, Gil’s course is going to be over here, Kyle’s is going to…
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