Several times each week, as I drive along 43rd Avenue and glance over at what was once the Dodgertown Golf Club, I allow myself a few seconds of nostalgia.
I think back to when the Los Angeles Dodgers would play baseball here in the morning, then play golf in the afternoon.
I remember when the Dodgers would finish spring training here and head west to start the season, leaving the open-to-the-public, nine-hole course for the community’s enjoyment.
I picture myself walking the freshly mown fairways, my clubs rattling behind in a rented pull cart, as I hurry to squeeze in a quick nine before dark.
“I hear that a lot,” said Peter O’Malley, the former Dodgers owner and president who returned to Vero Beach in 2012 to head a five-way partnership that operates Historic Dodgertown. “The old course was a very special part of Dodgertown and a very popular place to play golf, especially for retirees who didn’t belong to a private club.
“I understand that there are a lot of places to play golf now and it’s not needed in the community, like it was 20, 30, 40 years ago,” he added, “but there was a lot of history to the place.”
It was 50 years ago, in fact, that O’Malley’s father, Walter, opened the Dodgertown Golf Club, at least partially to provide a course for the team’s black players, who were not welcome at Vero Beach’s other golf clubs at that time.
Walter O’Malley, who owned the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers from 1950 until his death in 1979, had originally designed a pitch-and-putt course around the complex’s heartshaped, man-made lake for the team’s players to use during spring training in 1954.
Among the players who used the shortened course was Dodgers All-Star and eventual Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, who had broken baseball’s color barrier seven years earlier.
When the elder O’Malley decided to expand the facility and build a nine-hole course adjacent to Holman Stadium, he personally oversaw the layout’s design and made sure it was properly maintained.
“My dad wanted a place where all the players and coaches could go and play golf after practice,” Peter O’Malley said. “And he was an avid golfer, too, so you’d see him out there almost every day, playing with other people in the organization.
“Spring training was an important time of year for us,” he added. “The golf course was just another piece to the puzzle, another part of my father’s plan to have everyone living together, working together and playing together.”
You’ve heard of “The Dodger Way” – the team-first way the Dodgers played the game on the field, the classy way they were expected to conduct themselves off the field, the family-like way people in the organization were treated and were expected to treat each other?
It was, for all intents and purposes, the O’Malley way.
But when the O’Malley family sold the team to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Group in 1998, the way the Dodgers did things began to change.
The Dodger brand went from once-revered to oft-ridiculed when Murdoch sold out to Frank McCourt in 2004.
Four years later, the Dodgers would depart Dodgertown for glitzy, new, spring-training digs in the Arizona desert, ending a 61-year, mostly special marriage between team and town.
By then, though, the Dodgertown Golf Club already had been closed, ceasing operations in 2004.
McCourt’s Dodgers then sold the 37.5- acre property back to the City of Vero Beach for $10 million in 2005.
“When the Dodgers were sold to Fox, my job was to sell off all of the non-baseball properties,” said Historic Dodgertown Vice President Craig Callan, who has been running the complex for most of the past 35 years, 30 of them as a Dodgers executive.
“That included the two golf entities – the nine-hole Dodgertown course and the 18-hole Dodger Pines course across the street.”
Dodger Pines, which was opened in 1972 and featured a 667-yard, par- 6 hole, was closed in August 2002 and sold to private developers Don Proctor, Jerry Swanson and Earl Padgett for $17 million in 2004.
A year later, the City took out two $5 million loans to buy the Dodgertown Golf Club property, and nothing good has happened since.
Nothing at all, really.
The golf-course property was reduced by 2 1/2 acres when the city and county completed a land swap to allow for the 2012 construction of a four-field cloverleaf for youth baseball and softball at Historic Dodgertown, which is now a year-round, multi-sport facility.
The remaining 35 acres continue to sit idle, costing the City nearly $700,000 annually in sales-tax revenue to repay two $5 million loans it took out to purchase the property at what was the height of a local real-estate boom.
The payments are scheduled to drop to $660,000 in 2017, with the loan to be paid off in October 2025, but the debt still exceeds $6 million.
The City also spends roughly $17,000 per year to mow and maintain the property, which includes the old golf course clubhouse, now used for storage by the Recreation Department’s maintenance crews.
And the City no longer collects the $40,000-plus in property taxes it received when the Dodgers owned the land.
In hindsight, the City’s purchase was a costly mistake that was compounded by the Dodgers’ decision to divorce us.
The current City Council, however, hopes to dump a big chunk of the debt by selling the property in the not-too-distant future. To that end, the City has negotiated an agreement with the county to remove the deed restrictions that limited use of the land to a golf course or green space, making it virtually impossible to sell.
City Manager Jim O’Connor said the City is willing to work with prospective buyers on zoning, as long as the price is right and the plans are compatible with the neighboring properties – namely, Historic Dodgertown, Vero Beach Municipal Airport and the adjacent residential community.
“The City has no plans for the property, other than to sell it,” O’Connor said. “I don’t want to speculate on what the property might be used for, but we’re willing to listen.”
City Recreation Director Rob Slezak said he has received several proposals for the property over the years, a list that includes: par-3 golf course, lighted pitch-and-putt course, driving range, Frisbee golf course, bicycle motocross track and skate park.
Back in 2009, the property was the subject of newspaper headlines and, ultimately, the death knell for any hopes spring training might return to Vero Beach.
Late in the County’s efforts to bring the Baltimore Orioles’ Grapefruit League operations to town, the team suddenly demanded a 50-year lease on the Dodgertown Golf Club property, where it wanted to build offices, stores, restaurants and a hotel – a lease that would’ve remained in effect even if the Orioles moved their spring-training headquarters to another city.
It was then that County and City officials finally realized the negotiations were a farce, nothing more than a bargaining ploy by the Orioles, who shamelessly used the naïveté of the County’s representatives to get a better deal in Sarasota.
All these years later, the golf course property remains unused, a wistful reminder of a wondrous time at a special place, now marked only by a couple of signs that make sure we don’t forget that Dodgertown was historic.
“Everyone likes the idea of preserving green space, but that land is an asset,” Callan said. “It’s a valuable piece of property. We trust the City and County to do what’s in the best interest of the community.
“Let’s face it: Times have changed.”
Yes, they have.
The Dodgers have deserted Dodgertown. Vero Beach has been erased from the spring-training map. The Dodgertown Golf Club has been reduced to a real-estate listing.
“I hear the market is heating up,” O’Connor said.
Someday soon, I hope, I’ll drive along 43rd Avenue and won’t bother glancing over at whatever gets built on that grassy, nostalgia-filled patch of ground.
Maybe, if it doesn’t resemble a golf course, I won’t remember that it was.
