Miami’s elite want to hire Jack Nicklaus to transform this public golf course

Miami-Dade County admin October 2, 2026 0 Comments

Miami’s elite want to hire Jack Nicklaus to transform this public golf course

Key Biscayne’s Crandon Park would get a modernized tennis complex and a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus through an $80 million plan floated by a wealthy group of backers who say they want to upgrade the park facilities at their expense for the public to enjoy.

“What we want to do is build a magnificent course for the public,” said Andres Gaviria, a Key Biscayne resident and avid golfer who is helping lead the Crandon effort. “This is going to be a gift.”

The proposed overhaul of one of Miami-Dade County’s premier parks remains in the planning stage, with Gaviria and fellow organizers meeting privately with government officials and others to build support. Nicklaus has already provided a preliminary design of the proposed course.

The effort has been underway for several years. Mike Davey, a former Key Biscayne mayor who left office in 2022, said he met with Nicklaus about the proposal while he was mayor. “I’m a supporter,” he said.

Using private dollars to remake Crandon touches on a number of sensitive political and financial topics for Miami-Dade. Crandon is one of the few cash cows in the county parks system, generating surplus dollars to support the financially strapped parks system. That will put extra scrutiny on the long-term revenue and expense picture that an upgraded Crandon would bring. There’s also the issue of public access if a premier public course ended up requiring significantly higher costs for everyday golfers.

On the other hand, a privately funded upgrade would give Miami-Dade residents access to a top-notch golf course at a time when county funds are stretched by rising payroll costs and slowing property-value growth.

Then there are memories of the last time word spread of a plan to use private dollars for a significant upgrade of Crandon Park’s golf course. That $10 million offer came in 2014 from Donald Trump, then a local hotel owner thinking about running for political office. Miami-Dade commissioners ultimately rejected his management plan — which would have involved his Doral golf resort having control of the park’s tee times and revenue — in the weeks before he entered the Republican presidential primary.

This time around, there is no golf-related enterprise behind the Crandon proposal, and the backers say the only aim is to upgrade the playing experience for everybody. “It’s truly for a public park,” said Eugene Stearns, a prominent Key Biscayne attorney and a leader of the effort.

A key question is who would donate the dollars for upgrading the county-owned property.

Multiple sources said the group has courted Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge-fund mogul who lives in Miami and this week announced a $3 billion donation to bring a Carnegie Mellon college campus to the city’s Wynwood neighborhood. But Gaviria and Stearns declined to reveal the donors who may be in line to back the effort.

As described in a presentation obtained by the Miami Herald, the plan would bring sweeping changes to the waterfront park. The golf course would be ripped up and rebuilt, including elevating the playing area by several feet to protect against surge flooding. That would significantly reduce the amount of runoff into Biscayne Bay.

“People don’t realize that the course today is an environmental catastrophe,” Stearns said. “All of its ponds and lakes run into Biscayne Bay. The tide comes in and out, and with it, the chemicals and the fertilizers from the golf course.”

Golfers and tennis players could retire to a new three-story clubhouse with an observation deck at the top offering ocean views. The clubhouse would have a bar, restaurant, locker rooms and verandas overlooking the golf course and tennis courts.

The existing 37 tennis courts would be ripped up — including the 14,000-seat tennis stadium that had housed the annual Miami Open tournament before it moved to Hard Rock Stadium in 2019. Twenty-seven tennis courts would take their place, along with eight courts each for pickleball and padel.

While Crandon currently has two areas with tennis courts — including one surrounded by the golf course — the new design would move all courts to a racquet-sports area with its own mini clubhouse.

While Miami-Dade would continue managing the Crandon golf facility and racquet center, the donors would require a separate arrangement for maintaining the golf course. That would involve a private entity providing grounds crews for the course, an expense that would be funded through revenue from the upgraded course.

“Part of the program will be providing employment to the County staff who have been frustrated with the absence of resources,” the presentation reads. “Absent the highest quality management, a great golf course will quickly become a poor one. That cannot be allowed to happen.”

With historic amounts of money offered for a county park, the plan raises the question of whether the donors would have exclusive or special access to what Stearns predicts will be “one of the finest golf courses in the United States of America.”

Gaviria and Stearns said the donors would not be offered any advantage or access for their gifts. But they said the newly upgraded Crandon Park would likely have a pricing option that would let people purchase their way into a more exclusive lane for the golf course.

Miami-Dade already offers a patron card for golfers willing to pay $400 a year for early access to some tee times before reservations are available to the general public. Stearns and Gaviria said Crandon would likely have its own kind of patron card with a higher price point. “Maybe someone can get [a tee time] three weeks in advance” with the Crandon patron card, Gaviria said. “It’s not a membership. It gives you [early] access to the system” that everybody uses to reserve tee times.

County Commissioner Raquel Regalado, whose district includes Key Biscayne, said that while there may be more exclusive price tiers at an upgraded Crandon, golf there would remain easily available for everyday residents and visitors.

“We’re not going to create any sort of benefit for the donors,” she said. “Anybody can play. We’re not going to raise the prices. But, obviously, there will be a lot more options.”