by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
The office epitomizes the game of golf and how it should be played: casual, relaxed, fun. Yet, at the same time, the office atmosphere totally contradicts the company’s motto: urgency.
Jeans-wearing employees look over photos from golf courses in distant lands. Casually-dressed computer nerds create courses of the future while secretaries run around barefooted.
“I get more done,” one says, and she means it.
Even the president of the company, Ed Seay — a longtime beaches resident, former Marine, U. of Florida grad, close friend and business partner of Arnold Palmer — doesn’t look as if he’s ever but a pair of spikes away from being able to tee it up.
Such is life at Palmer Course Design Company these days. Seay and Palmer have spent 30 years working together. Not bad for a company that started with Seay and Palmer and not much else.
Since those early days, much has changed, yet the core has remained the same. Seay and Palmer still run the show, and many others have come. But, hardly anyone has left.
“We have a very low attrition rate,” Seay says proudly of his 26-person company.
When Seay and Palmer started working together three decades ago, amazingly, their first combined effort happened half a world away.
“We had one job. I worked as the golf course architect and he was the golf course consultant in Japan,” said Seay, who at the time was operating Ed Seay, Inc. “The name of the club was Manago Country Club.
“It was just Arnold and me at that time. When he hired me it was a very rugged site and he was working with a fella and friend of mine, Frank Dwayne. Frank was confined to a wheelchair and he had some kind of weird virus. He knew that Frank was not going to be able to cover the site and that’s how we got started.
“Then, in 1978, we started talking about Arnold buying my company or forming a new company where I would work exclusively for him because at the time I was doing other work. Jan. 1, 1979 we formed Palmer Course Design Company.”
Palmer had met Seay earlier in North Carolina and the two quickly realized there was both a friendship and a good working relationship being forged.
“I was already in the course design business on my own and was looking for a good young architect to compliment my activities,” explained Palmer. “I found him [Seay] in Winston-Salem where he was working for Ellis Maples at a course called Bermuda Run. We hit it off right away and it all went from there.”
The two had been working together informally long before the formation of PCDC. Seay was living and working in Augusta with wife Lynn and Palmer was splitting his time between Orlando and his hometown of Latrobe, Pa. Seay eventually made his way back to Jacksonville, settled in Ponte Vedra and opened an office with Barbara Gonzalez in what used to be Villa Barcelona on A1A. Gonzalez stayed with Seay 25 years, saw the merger between the two companies and watched as the office slowly grew.
Architect Bob Walker joined Seay and the two spent 13 years together before Walker moved on to start his own design company. Since then, PCDC has changed slowly, but dramatically.
Today, there are four vice presidents and all four play equally vital, but diverse roles: Harrison Minchew is the director of design and construction services. Erik Larsen is the director of sales and administration of the office. Kevin Benedict is the director of marketing and advertising and Vicky Martz is the director of environmental design.
“All of them are members of the American Society of Golf Course Architects,” said Seay, proudly. “We have a very stable force of leadership and we cover an awful lot of ground.”
Why Ponte Vedra?
PCDC played a major role in making the Jacksonville area one of the most attractive golf destinations in the country, if not the world.
Most people, if asked, would tell you that former PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman’s decision to place the Tour’s headquarters smack in the heart of Sawgrass 25 years ago was the catalyst for placing Jacksonville on the golf map. Fair enough answer, but why do you think Beman chose Ponte Vedra, of all the places in the country, in the first place?
“I firmly believe what happened was Sawgrass,” said Seay. “Sawgrass was built and it was the newest kid on the block. It was at the beach, which is another thing. You get across the ditch and you enter a whole new style of living. It was such a popular destination here in Ponte Vedra that the Tour became interested.”
Tour executives and the playing pros became so enamored with the area they permanently moved the PGA Tour headquarters and the Tournament Players Championship to Sawgrass, holding five tournaments on the windy beach course before moving to the Stadium Course in 1982. The move also coincided with the opening of the Tour’s new headquarters.
According to Seay, the new headquarters was bound to be here, but the tournament almost stayed at the beach course.
“They had three or four tournaments at the beach course and at one point the Tour tried to buy the golf course,” explained Seay. “I don’t know how, but I think they tried to buy the golf course, the beach club and everything that was the amenity package that was Sawgrass. Somehow they didn’t strike a deal with the banks. But, I know Deane Beman liked this place and he felt this would be the new headquarters.
“He cut a deal with the Fletchers, Paul and Jerome, and they got the piece of property across the street [A1A] and they built the Stadium Course and the Marriott. Once that emphasis hit, it went through Ponte Vedra — and Sawgrass gave it the ignition — the rest is history. The good news about the beach is hopefully there’s no room left to develop.”
Long before Beman and the Tour discovered Ponte Vedra, Palmer found the oceanside gem and set up shop.
“Ponte Vedra is great,” he said. “I get there periodically to visit with the staff and see how things are going in the office. I do play [golf] from time to time when I am in Ponte Vedra. Various courses ... Plantation, where I am a member ... and the PGA Tour courses, as well.”
Who’s Ed Seay?
Seay graduated from Fletcher High in 1956 and the University of Florida with a degree in landscape architecture in the spring of 1961.
It was a summer job and a class at UF that piqued his interest in golf course architecture. He spent two summers while in college working for Joe Walker of Duval Landscaping and had no idea he would eventually team up with Palmer to design some of the most interesting golf courses in some of the most exotic parts of the world.
“It was curiosity,” said Seay. “I got into it in college. I was in landscape architecture and one of the projects involved a nine-hole golf course. We had a professor who was very adamant about your research and there was nothing [on golf course architecture] in 1958 or ‘59. There were 5,000 golf courses out there and I couldn’t find any research on them. That struck my fancy and I also liked the scope of large-scale planning and community development which involved recreation and golf.
“I asked him, ‘How do you get to be one of those golf course guys?’ I didn’t play golf at the time. He said, ‘It takes a lot to get in business because you have to have experience before somebody will hire you.’ That’s how I got into it. Just curiosity.”
Three decades
with the King
Seay and Palmer have 30 years of satisfying a mutual curiosity. Over those three decades, they have designed and built hundreds of courses globally and have seen their two-man company evolve into one the most efficiently run businesses in the country. In 1979, the company consisted of Seay and Palmer and four others. Today, there are 20 other full-time employees and an intern or two scattered around. Amazingly, over those 22 years, PCDC has experienced virtually no turnover.
“Other than retirement and a personal situation [an employee left to move to Ohio to take care of her ailing mother], we have not lost anybody,” said Seay. “We take care of each other. I’ve got the finest company in the United States. I don’t really know if you want to compare apples to apples, but I’ll put us up against General Motors or anybody else as far as the individual talent and their production.
“Take Arnold and me out of the equation, and look at the work force. You’re dealing with 24 people that probably do the work of 70 to 80. And, do it as well as anybody in the industry.”
The fact that PCDC was started in Ponte Vedra is no surprise. The fact that it’s still in Ponte Vedra is a surprise, especially when you consider one of its owners is perhaps the most popular and influential man in golf lives elsewhere. Seay said the main reason the company has stayed put is because no one can come up with a viable reason to move it.
“We have discussed it several times,” said Seay of possibly moving PCDC to Orlando. “I think it was the economic times that prevented the move to Orlando. We knew it wouldn’t be in Latrobe. Arnold, at one point back in the mid-80s, discussed moving Arnold Palmer Enterprises into one building and that building was going to be in Orlando and PCDC would have gone down there.
“We also realized that I was only here about three months of the year. As we got bigger, the designers — the Harrison Minchews and Erik Larsens and Kevin Benedicts and Vicky Martzes and all the ones that fell into the design mode — they travel, too. So, it didn’t really matter.”
Palmer said not only did they decide to leave PCDC in Ponte Vedra, they also scrapped the whole consolidation plan.
“After due consideration, we decided to abandon the consolidation plan entirely,” said Palmer. “Since our offices in Ponte Vedra were set up so well, I thought it best not to change anything there.”
Today, PCDC has 62 projects going, eight international. While having an exceptional staff certainly contributes to the company’s success and ability to handle multiple projects, Seay said one innovation has revolutionized the way his company works.
“The computers. The time element involved and the accuracy involved because of what the computers have allowed us to do,” said Seay. “What used to take four to six months now takes 30-45 days and the accuracy is total if the information you put in is accurate.
“For instance, take a topographical map. If that has been controlled and surveyed properly and that [information] goes into that machine, it will be dead on. And, our cut and fills that used to take a week or two weeks, we can do in 30 minutes.”
Irrigation also used to be a nightmare for course designers. Today, it’s a breeze.
“Twenty years ago you’d be looking at a system with 400 to 600 sprinkler heads,” said Seay. “It is not unusual today to have 1,200 to 1,500 to 2,000 heads on a golf course and all totally automatic. The new signature satellite system is great. The wonderful thing is they could put it on the space shuttle, but it doesn’t take an astronaut to run it.”
While simplicity and efficiency are excellent principles for any company to adopt, PCDC takes those two concepts a step or two farther. When a Palmer architect designs a course, they go out of their way to produce a signature product without leaving a divot behind. In other words, Palmer courses come with a standard but not a norm.
“A Palmer standard is something we discuss quite a bit when we are in the design phase and while we are in the planning stage,” said Seay. “We know about that much of the club’s success is going to depend on the standard they set for themselves. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when you have a well-groomed, pleasant atmosphere, everything works. I’ve always said that great design can easily lose its luster if it’s not maintained properly. By the same token, you can have a mediocre design covered over by luxurious and lush conditions. Golfers love to see that green grass.”
While PCDC’s biggest recent project locally was the redesign of the Plantation Country Club, Palmer said there is not a current trend to do redesigns as opposed to new courses.
“I don’t think there is any trend like that,” he said. “We do redesigns from time to time, but that really doesn’t affect designing new courses. There’s a bit of a money crunch right now and the business may slow down a bit, but I think the demand for new courses will continue for some time to come.”
Locally, PCDC has designed and built Plantation, North Hampton, Hidden Hills, Mill Cove, Marsh Landing, plus the Oak Bridge and Plantation renovations. But, Seay’s crown jewel just may be that course tucked neatly beside the Atlantic Ocean — Sawgrass. Seay’s first effort and the former home of the TPC is still one of the area’s most challenging, well-groomed courses around.