Adios Golf Club

Adios Golf Club in Coconut Creek is among Arnold Palmer's most demanding South Florida designs, stretching nearly 6,900 yards with a course rating of 74.7 and slope of 143 through a layout that rewards length and accuracy in equal measure.

Adios Golf Club in Coconut Creek owes its existence to an heiress's devotion to her dogs, a harness racing champion's search for the ideal South Florida golf property, and a founding membership that included Arnold Palmer, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas, and Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford — a combination of circumstances that produced one of Broward County's most closely held private golf clubs. The land's story begins with Eleanor Ritchey, an heiress whose grandfather founded the Quaker State Oil Refining Company. Ritchey, who never married and had no children, shared her Coconut Creek property with 150 dogs. When she died in 1968, she bequeathed the land to her dogs, and a local bank served as trustee of the estate until it could be sold after the animals' deaths. The property eventually became available for development.

Near the end of the 1970s, a group of golf enthusiasts began searching for a location between Miami and Palm Beach to build their own private course. The group was led by Delvin Miller, who had achieved extraordinary success in harness racing as a driver, trainer, breeder, and owner. Miller asked his friend Charles MacCallum, a real estate developer, to identify a suitable property. MacCallum found the former Ritchey land in Coconut Creek — large, rural, and positioned between the two population centers the group wanted to serve. The course was originally called Dog's Run in an acknowledgment of the property's unusual ownership history.

The membership later renamed it Adios Golf Club, honoring Delvin Miller's champion racehorse Adios, who was also an influential sire in harness racing history. The name carried both personal meaning for Miller and the spirit of a private club built on the vision and resources of a specific group of friends. Arnold Palmer and his design partner Ed Seay were commissioned to design the course. Palmer — at the time operating an active golf design practice in partnership with Seay through Palmer Course Design — was not merely the designer but one of the 16 founding members of the club, investing in the project as a participant as well as a creator. Construction began in 1982 on the Coconut Creek property, with Palmer and Seay working with the flat South Florida terrain to create a layout that presented genuine strategic interest despite the limited natural topography.

The founding membership roster — Palmer, Dave Thomas, Whitey Ford, and roughly a dozen other figures of comparable prominence — defined the character of the club from the outset as a private institution built by and for people who valued both the golf and the company. Adios has operated throughout its history as an invitation-only facility with no public access, a policy that preserves the intimate private character the founding membership intended. The club sits in Broward County's northwest corner, a setting that has remained relatively rural compared to the dense development of coastal Broward, giving Adios the physical separation that the founders sought when they commissioned MacCallum to find a site removed from the more congested golf markets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale.