Sports Team Owners Who Own Private Golf Clubs (and What Their Clubs Teach the Rest of Us)

Owning a professional sports team puts you in one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. A surprising number of the people who have reached it then go and build another one, this time with eighteen holes and a membership committee.

The pattern is not new, and it is not a coincidence. A sports franchise and a private golf club are built on the same idea: scarcity, a carefully guarded roster, and a place where the right people want to be seen. I have spent more than 20 years working in and with top private clubs, and the clubs that team owners create are some of the clearest lessons in what members actually value. Here are the owners, the clubs, and what club leaders can take from them.

The Owners and Their Clubs

Stephen Ross: Apogee Club, Hobe Sound, Florida

The Miami Dolphins owner’s club is the most ambitious project on this list. Ross owns Apogee in partnership with Michael Pascucci, the developer behind Sebonack and the Bear’s Club, on roughly 1,200 acres of former farmland in Martin County. The club has three courses by three different designers: the West by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, the South by Tom Fazio II and Mike Davis, and the North by Kyle Phillips. The West opened in December 2023, the South in November 2024, and the North since. There is no residential real estate. The club is built around golf, practice, and cottages for overnight stays.

The scale of the commitment shows in the details reported by Global Golf Post: when neighboring land came up for sale, the partners bought it within 48 hours, and they purchased their own construction equipment rather than renting it. That is not how developers who need a quick return behave. It is how owners behave when they are building something they intend to keep.

Michael Jordan: The Grove XXIII, Hobe Sound, Florida

A few miles away is the club Jordan built after deciding, by most accounts, that the pace of play at other clubs was too slow. Jordan, the former majority owner of the Charlotte Hornets (he kept a minority stake after selling control in 2023) and co-owner of NASCAR’s 23XI Racing, opened The Grove XXIII in 2019 on a former citrus grove. The name is Roman numeral 23.

Bobby Weed designed the course with a routing that lets members play four different nine-hole combinations or short loops of three to six holes. There are no set tee times. Membership is by invitation only and has been reported at fewer than 100 people. Every design choice serves one goal: a member can show up and play quickly, with people he or she wants to play with.

Jim Crane: The Floridian, Palm City, Florida

The Houston Astros owner bought The Floridian in 2010 from another sports owner, Wayne Huizenga, who founded the Florida Marlins and Florida Panthers and owned the Miami Dolphins. Huizenga had opened the Gary Player-designed course in the 1990s as something close to a private retreat, with a marina, helipads, and guest cottages on the St. Lucie River. The reported purchase price was $25.6 million.

Crane brought in Tom Fazio for a full redesign, then added a learning center, spa, and fitness facilities. He also started the Crane Cup, an invitational amateur event hosted at the club. The membership drew national attention in 2018, when Crane told reporters that both Barack Obama and George W. Bush had joined. Few clubs can say two former presidents from opposite parties chose them.

Bill Foley: Rock Creek Cattle Company, Deer Lodge, Montana

Foley, owner of the Vegas Golden Knights and majority owner of Premier League club AFC Bournemouth, bought a Montana ranch in 2004 and turned part of it into one of the West’s most admired private clubs. The ranch still runs cattle across roughly 30,000 acres. The golf course, designed by Tom Doak, opened in 2008.

The club has limited home and cabin sites rather than a dense community. It has also done double duty for his team: the Golden Knights held training-camp retreats at the ranch in 2018 and 2019. For an owner, a club can be a place to build culture as much as a place to play.

Bob McNair: The Golf Club at Briar’s Creek, Johns Island, South Carolina

The founding owner of the Houston Texans was one of the most traveled club members in American golf, with memberships at Pine Valley, Kiawah Island Club, Castle Pines, and The Floridian, among others. In 2015 he became an owner. McNair led a group that bought Briar’s Creek, a Rees Jones course near Charleston, out of bankruptcy with an $11.3 million bid that a bankruptcy judge approved.

Briar’s Creek had been named a Golf Digest Best New Private Course in 2003, but it had run into financial trouble. Under the McNair family, the club recapitalized as a debt-free private club and later invested in renovations and guest cottages. The family has continued that investment since McNair’s death in 2018.

McNair also helped create one of the most unusual clubs in the country. He co-founded Congaree Golf Club in Jasper County, South Carolina, with Dan Friedkin, whose Friedkin Group owns the club and who also owns AS Roma and Everton. The Tom Fazio course opened in 2017, and the club has no members in the traditional sense. Instead it has “ambassadors” whose contributions support the Congaree Foundation, which develops young golfers. It is a club built to fund a mission rather than to serve a roster, and it shows how far an owner’s point of view can stretch the definition of a private club.

Joe Lewis: Isleworth, Lake Nona, and Albany

Through his investment firm, Tavistock Group, the British billionaire whose ENIC controlled Tottenham Hotspur built a portfolio of clubs that included Isleworth and Lake Nona in Orlando and Albany in the Bahamas, the last with Tiger Woods and Ernie Els among its partners. For years, members of those clubs competed against each other in the Tavistock Cup, a PGA Tour-sanctioned exhibition that ended after 2013. Lewis passed control of ENIC to a family trust in 2022, but the model he built, a family of clubs that compete and socialize together, remains one of the most interesting in the business.

Why Team Owners Keep Doing This

There is no survey of billionaire motives, and I would be wary of anyone who claims to have one. But the clubs themselves tell a consistent story.

They want a better experience than the one they can buy. Jordan is the clearest example. He was already a member of an elite club and built his own anyway, because no existing club played the way he wanted. When the customer can afford anything, the only thing left to buy is control.

They understand the value of a guarded roster. Sports owners spend their careers managing scarce assets: a fixed number of franchises, roster spots, and seats near the court. Invitation-only membership with a small cap is the same logic applied to golf.

A club is a place to host. Owners entertain sponsors, players, politicians, and other owners. A private club where the owner sets the guest list is a more powerful setting than any suite. Foley bringing his team to Montana and Crane building an invitational around his club are the same instinct.

They think in decades. Buying the equipment instead of renting it, recapitalizing a bankrupt club without debt, keeping a working ranch rather than selling lots: these are the decisions of owners who expect to hold the asset for a long time, not to sell it at the end of a development cycle.

It does not always work. Jerry Jones lent the Dallas Cowboys name to a public course in Grapevine, Texas, that opened in 2001, and in 2014 it was sold to Arcis Golf as part of a larger portfolio deal. A famous brand can sell tee times. It cannot create a membership culture by itself.

What Club Leaders Can Learn From the Owners

Most clubs will never have a billionaire founder. They can still borrow the lessons.

• Design around the member’s time. The Grove XXIII has no tee times and offers short loops. Ask how many of your policies exist for the convenience of operations rather than members. Pace of play is a membership issue, not just a golf issue.
• Treat scarcity as a strategy, not a waitlist. The owners’ clubs cap membership on purpose and protect the cap. If your club is full, decide how full is right before demand decides for you.
• Make the club a stage for hosting. Members who entertain at the club bring the best prospects through the door. Give them reasons and tools to do it, from guest policies to private dining.
• Tell the founder’s story, or create one. Every club on this list is defined by a clear point of view. A club with a confident identity sells itself more easily than one that tries to be everything to everyone.
• Build relationships between clubs. The Tavistock Cup turned a group of clubs into a rivalry members cared about. Reciprocal programs and inter-club events can do the same at any scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which sports team owners own private golf clubs?

Notable examples include Stephen Ross of the Miami Dolphins (Apogee Club), Jim Crane of the Houston Astros (The Floridian), Bill Foley of the Vegas Golden Knights (Rock Creek Cattle Company), the family of late Houston Texans founder Bob McNair (Briar’s Creek), and Michael Jordan, the former Charlotte Hornets majority owner (The Grove XXIII). Wayne Huizenga, who owned the Miami Dolphins, founded The Floridian before selling it to Crane.

Can you join Michael Jordan’s golf club?

The Grove XXIII is invitation-only, with membership reported at fewer than 100 people. There is no public application process, and the club does not publish its initiation fee.

Why do billionaires build their own golf clubs?

The clubs suggest a few consistent reasons: control over the experience, a small and carefully chosen membership, a private setting for hosting, and a long-term asset that reflects the owner’s taste. Some, like The Floridian under Huizenga, also began as personal retreats.

The Bottom Line

Team owners build private clubs for the same reasons they buy teams: to own something rare, to control who gets in, and to create a place where the right people want to gather. Their clubs are extreme versions of what every private club is selling. The leaders who study them closely will find the lesson is not about money. It is about knowing exactly who your club is for, and building every policy around that member.

Zack Bates has spent more than 20 years working in and with the country’s top private clubs. Want to sharpen your club’s identity and membership strategy? Private Club Marketing can help.