BOYNE Golf keeps giving golfers reasons to return

In a 1961 Sports Illustrated profile, Everett Kircher, the visionary founder of Boyne Resorts, described the rapid and unlikely growth of Boyne Mountain Resort, the ski destination he founded in 1948.

“We’re big because we think big,” Kircher said.

The story was titled, “Mountain Out of a Molehill,” a reference to the fact that Kircher had taken a Northern Michigan hill with 500 feet of vertical drop, called it a mountain and turned it into a wildly popular ski resort with onsite lodging, restaurants, bars, a skating rink and other activities. The legend goes that Kircher bought the initial 40 acres for Boyne Mountain from a farmer who decided the land was too steep for planting. Kircher agreed, but generously offered him $1 for the land, then set about building his resort. That was Kircher – always thinking big.

“Guys like Everett are from a generation that thinks differently,” Kircher’s friend Warren Miller, known for his popular ski films, said upon news of Kircher’s passing in 2002.

By the time SI ran that story in 1961, Kircher had already opened his first golf course, a nine-holer, in a bid to turn his Northern Michigan resort into a year-round destination. A few years later, he recruited Robert Trent Jones Sr. to build The Heather, which opened in 1966 at his second resort, The Highlands at Harbor Springs. Kircher wasn’t just creating more reasons for his guests to return and summer jobs for his employees. He had ignited a golf building boom that reshaped the Northern Michigan landscape.

These days the region is known as “America’s Summer Golf Capital,” which doesn’t seem the least bit audacious given the options created by Kircher, his children (who inherited their father’s go-for-broke style), and the developers who followed his lead. Summer golf in Northern Michigan is idyllic: sun-swept 80-degree days, with courses styled by the game’s top architects, spread across terrain from the shores of Lake Michigan to hillside vistas at places such as Boyne Mountain and The Highlands that look like something out of the Berkshires or Rockies. 

BOYNE Golf is at the center of the region’s golf scene, with its three resorts and 10 courses (including the three configurations at 27-hole Bay Harbor Golf Club). To this day, the resorts are anchored by The Heather, whose timelessness was reflected in the fact that the National Golf Course Owners Association honored…