ALPINE, Ala. – Ever seen an abandoned golf course and wondered, is it still possible to play golf there? Is it salvageable? How much would it take to reopen, at what cost?
With hundreds of courses having closed in the U.S. after 2008’s market meltdown, there are plenty of such overgrown properties – including dozens of layouts by famous designers. Nothing comes from many of these properties except memories and maybe a few dreams of golf renovation.
Rarely, those dreams of resuscitating an abandoned layout become reality. It just takes the right person.
Enter Tony Parton, a former federal corrections officer living in rural Alabama. He had no plans to take over a failed course. But he loved golf – and one particular layout.
It was called Alpine Bay. The majority of Alabama golfers never heard of it, and most of the minority who knew of it never bothered to play it. They couldn’t tell you how to get there or even if it was still open.
Alpine Bay Golf Club in Alpine, Alabama, after the course was salvaged and reopened (Golfweek)
Located in east-central Alabama 44 miles east of downtown Birmingham near the southern shore of Logan Martin Lake (part of the broad Coosa River water basin), Alpine Bay Golf Club originally was planned to have two 18-hole courses. But as funds for a major resort development were lacking, only one of the two courses opened in 1972.
That course had a lot going for it: a par-72, 6,518-yard championship layout designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., namesake of Alabama’s Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail that was built decades later. Moreover, Jones built it with assistance of his son Rees Jones, then in his early 30s, who became a prizewinning course designer and brand name in his own right, as well as young Roger Rulewich, the architect who two decades later would actually design most of the courses on the Trail.
Troubled financially from the start, Alpine Bay – with its one course and a sparse nearby population – struggled year after year to stay in business. Although a beautiful layout in a brilliant natural setting, Alpine Bay was hard to reach even from Birmingham, with at least part of the drive on winding, lonely two-lane roads. After barely managing to stay alive for decades, it was shuttered in 2014.
The closing of Alpine Bay caused hardly a ripple in the golf world, even in Alabama. But the place had built a loyal following. Namely, Tony Parton. And Alpine Bay’s closure did not end Parton’s love affair with the…
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