Bamberger's Muni Monday: The Palm Beach Par-3

With the PGA Tour moving on from last week’s Palm Beach Gardens, Michael Bamberger at Golf.com profiles the amazingly-situated Palm Beach Par-3, a true muni with history and a wonderful story of rejuvenation thanks to Ray and Maria Floyd.

Green fees for 18 go as low as $21 for residents up to a $57 max. And Sam Snead won an LPGA event there!

Even better is Floyd’s love of Par-3 courses and the fundraising effort to save the place.

Floyd is a par3ophile. He loves the Par-3 course at Augusta National and for years he and his little gang, on the Mondays and Tuesdays of Masters week, would go straight from the 18th green to the little course to settle their bets. These days, the course is off-limits until the Wednesday afternoon tournament.

But Floyd said he never even thought about the Augusta course when he was doing his work at this Par-3. “You couldn’t have a more different piece of land,” Floyd said. The Palm Beach course is flat as a nickel, windswept, public and busy. Floyd changed the routing so the holes move in a variety of directions, added more slopes to the greens and replaced the Bermuda grass with Paspalum, a thick-bladed grass that can withstand salt-heavy air. Floyd and his late wife, Maria, raised $3 million from private sources for the renovation and the township put up a matching amount.