See that field over there?” Bobby Weed says, pointing toward a few hundred acres of grassland abutting a distant tree line.

“That’s my ocean.”

Weed is standing outside the nearly completed clubhouse at The Grove XXIII, the uber-exclusive golf course he built for his client, NBA Hall of Famer Michael Jordan (it opened in the fall of 2019), explaining how Shinnecock Hills became the inspiration for the design even though this particular site—formerly a citrus grove near Hobe Sound—is South Florida flat and unambiguously landlocked.

“We started to gradually raise this land where the clubhouse is, and as we did, we realized we had views across the whole course,” he says. “We could see everything.” The vastness of the property and the sandy, grass-covered spaces between the holes reminded Weed and senior design associate Chris Monti of the famed U.S. Open venue on Long Island. A visit to Shinnecock to double-check their instincts confirmed the idea.

The logic works. Seen from the patio, The Grove XXIII’s holes spool and unspool against the open backdrop of undeveloped pasture—the sea. And from the golf course, the clubhouse is never out of sight, a modernist stand-in for Stanford White’s omnipresent, wood-framed landmark.

The Grove XXIII (the Roman numeral represents the number Jordan wore with the Chicago Bulls) twists in an ingenious double-helix routing that can be played in four nine + nine combinations, and in shorter three- to six-hole loops. The key to the flexibility is the clustering of greens and tees, and a crossover junction after the fourth and 13th holes. Walking off the fourth green, for instance, play can continue on at the fifth, or it can switch over to the 14th and finish in the opposite direction, so each nine can be broken into sections.

The Clubhouse is designed by architects Nichols Brosch Wurst Wolfe & Associates (NBWW) from Coral Gables, FL.