City Golf Courses in Jacksonville

The City of Jacksonville has been in the golf business three separate times. Its first two courses were Brentwood, on the Northside off Interstate 95, and Hyde Park. The City Commission shut both in April 1959 rather than let Black and white golfers share them, and sold them the next year. The city came back to golf in the late 1980s with the Golf Club of Jacksonville at Bent Creek on the Westside, a public course run for years by the PGA Tour, and again in 2003 with Blue Cypress Golf Course off University Boulevard in Arlington, which closed in 2016 and reopened in 2021.

That history makes municipal golf in Jacksonville a civic story as much as a recreation one. The 1959 closing, the lawsuits that followed and the 1962 ruling that the private buyers could not keep the courses segregated are documented in the Jax Daily Record's long-running 50 years ago column, compiled from the Jacksonville Public Library's periodical archives, and in a 2017 News4Jax report built around World Golf Hall of Fame historian Dr. Tony Parker.

Before 1959 the two city courses ran on a split schedule. The Jax Daily Record recounts that African American golfers were allowed to play one day each week at each course, and white golfers were not allowed to play on those days. News4Jax, citing Dr. Parker, puts the days at Mondays at Brentwood and Fridays at Hyde Park. News4Jax describes Brentwood as built in the 1920s and one of Jacksonville's oldest public golf courses.

The challenge began on the course. According to News4Jax, four Black golfers, Frank Hampton among them, were trying to finish a qualifying round for a national tournament, were turned away at Brentwood and then at Hyde Park, petitioned the city commissioners, and filed suit in federal court. The case carried Hampton's name.

The city chose closure over integration. The Jax Daily Record reports that the City Commission closed the courses after a federal court order cleared the way for African-Americans to play on the links at the same time as whites, and its September 1959 column gives the date as April 6, 1959. The same column records a stormy commission meeting that September at which Black clergymen and golfers asked the city to end discrimination at all municipal recreation, including the Gator Bowl, while commissioners opened bids for the two closed courses and found none. The commission then dropped the minimum prices of $606,000 for Hyde Park and $496,000 for the Brentwood layout.

The sales closed in February 1960. The Jax Daily Record lists Hyde Park at $615,000 with a $15,000 down payment and Brentwood at $600,000 with a $10,000 down payment, both financed by mortgages held by the City. Golfers paid more under the new owners: the Record reported that greens fees doubled to $2, against the $1 the city had charged, with $10 annual memberships.

The courts did not accept the sale as the end of the matter. The Record writes that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans said the new owners became agents of the state by the terms of the sale agreement and could not exclude African-Americans. One term mattered most: a reverter clause returned the properties to the City if they stopped being golf courses. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund's archive holds a March 16, 1962 press release announcing the appeals court argument in the Jacksonville golf case. In November 1962 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the appellate ruling, and News4Jax dates that decision to November 19, 1962.

Accounts of the dates differ in later reporting. A 2004 Jax Daily Record article says the City owned both the now-defunct Brentwood and what is now Hyde Park and sold both in the early 1970s to avoid integrating them, while the contemporary columns place the sales in 1960. Brentwood was still operating as a nine-hole course in 2017, when News4Jax reported that First Tee of North Florida children play there regularly, with Hyde Park Golf Club running 18 holes.

For more than two decades after 1960 the city, and later the consolidated city, owned no course of its own. In January 1966, according to the Jax Daily Record, Mayor Lou Ritter recommended studying a new city course and suggested the perimeter of Jacksonville International Airport, then under construction, while City Council President W.O. Mattox Jr. said the city should stay out of the golf business and not compete with private industry. The same report noted that Jacksonville Beach, a separate city in Duval County, was glad to be in the golf business: its 18-hole course cleared about $63,000 in 1965.

The return came with a partner. The Jax Daily Record reported in March 2004 that the Golf Club of Jacksonville, then 17 years old, was owned by the City and was built with an operating agreement with the PGA Tour. Bobby Weed designed it, and it sits beside the Bent Creek housing development off 103rd Street on the Westside. The Tour's Vernon Kelly said the city did not own a course at the time and was under pressure to fill the void. In 2004 the Tour opted out of its contract, saying play had fallen off, and the City's parks department prepared a request for proposals for a new operator. The Record noted that other courses in the area were also run by companies that did not own them, naming Julington Creek, Windsor Parke and Cecil Field.

Blue Cypress is the city's newest golf story. Golf.com reported in April 2021 that it was born as an 18-hole private club in the 1960s and became a municipal course in 2003, when the city took it over and made it a nine-hole track inside a park of the same name. Revenue and conditions slid, and in 2016 the course closed. Council member Joyce Morgan, joined by Council member Ron Salem, assembled $450,000 from different corners of the city budget, and in 2020 the city hired Indigo Golf Partners to rework the course with a bigger range, a 3,500-square-foot putting green and uniform mowing heights. The driving range and course reopened in April 2021.

The course has grown since. Jacksonville Today reported in May 2024 that the city, which owns the nine-hole course near Jacksonville University, would add three par-3 holes totaling 376 yards for $800,000, plus a new putting green and eventually a clubhouse to house the Jacksonville University men's and women's golf teams and First Tee programs. By August 2025 the three holes, branded Little Blue, had opened beside the original nine, known as Big Blue, and the full 12-hole routing is called The Dozen.

As of August 2025, Jacksonville Today reported, Blue Cypress is managed by Indigo Sports, adult fees run from $21 to $37, and children 17 and under play Little Blue free with a paying adult. Visit Jacksonville lists the park at 4012 University Blvd. North in Arlington, with soccer fields, tennis and pickleball courts, trails, a scenic overlook, fishing access and a picnic shelter, and the City of Jacksonville lists the Blue Cypress Center at the same address, open weekdays from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Private clubs have long anchored golf in Duval County. The Deerwood Country Club off Southside Boulevard, designed by George Cobb in 1960, hosted the PGA Tour's Greater Jacksonville Open from 1967 to 1975, the event that later became The Players Championship, Jacksonville Today reported in September 2025. The Tour's own Vernon Kelly told the Jax Daily Record in 2004 that one motivation for the Bent Creek course was that Jacksonville was the Tour's hometown. The city courses, by contrast, have been built around low fees and access, from the $1 greens fee at Brentwood and Hyde Park in the 1950s to the free junior play at Little Blue today.