Most of Broken Sound's golf life happens on the Club Course, the layout tucked inside the residential villages where homes back up to fairways and a cart ride to the first tee takes a few minutes. The Old Course is a different animal. It sits off Yamato Road and Military Trail, screened by trees and office parks, with its own separate clubhouse and no homes lining any of its eighteen holes. It was built on what used to be part of the Yamato Colony farmland, and today it functions less like a neighborhood amenity and more like a stand-alone golf sanctuary that happens to share a name with the community around it.
Getting onto that course as a member isn't automatic. Broken Sound's membership structure runs in tiers, and as of the fees effective October 1, 2025, a Sports and Tennis Social membership, the entry point at roughly $130,000 in non-refundable initiation, buys tennis, pickleball, the pool, and the fitness center, but no golf at all. Step up to Club Course Golf, around $175,000, and you get the fairways inside the gates, the ones most residents actually see from their backyards. The Old Course is reserved for the top tier, Old Course Golf, at roughly $225,000. Two of the club's three membership tiers, in other words, pay real money for golf privileges elsewhere in the community and still never get a tee time on the layout that hosts a PGA TOUR Champions event.
For one week every March, that changes. The gate that separates most of Broken Sound from its own Old Course opens to the public, ticketed and otherwise, and for a few hours on one particular evening, it opens with no ticket required at all.
A golf sanctuary with no homes on it
The Old Course stretches 7,150 yards from the championship tees at a par of 72, with elevated greens on 14 of its 18 holes and water in play on 12 of them, including the island green at the par-3 17th. Originally laid out by Joe Lee in 1978, it was reworked by Rees Jones, who kept Lee's routing while modernizing the playing surfaces and drainage. Before it became a tournament host in its own right, it carried the PGA TOUR Champions season opener and the TimberTech Championship. Broken Sound describes it as one of the few stand-alone golf experiences left in Boca Raton, hidden enough from the road that a driver on Yamato could pass within a few hundred yards and never know it's there.
That separation is precisely what makes tournament week notable. The course residents can't casually walk onto, the one that requires the club's most expensive membership tier to play regularly, is the same course that turns into a spectator event with grandstands, skyboxes, and a leaderboard on national television.
What a $225,000 initiation buys, and what it doesn't
| Membership tier | Initiation fee | Everyday Old Course access | Access during tournament week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sports / Tennis Social | ~$130,000 | None | Same public ticket as any Boca Raton resident |
| Club Course Golf | ~$175,000 | None | Same public ticket as any Boca Raton resident |
| Old Course Golf | ~$225,000 | Full, year-round | Full access, plus member amenities like skyboxes |
The table looks almost absurd next to the tournament's programming. A member who has never paid for Old Course privileges and a non-member who lives three miles away in downtown Boca Raton show up to tournament week on identical footing. The wall the club spends most of the year maintaining, in dollars and in membership committee approval, comes down for a handful of days.
Three days that flip the gate
The James Hardie Pro Football Hall of Fame Invitational launched in 2025, the idea of Ken Kennerly, a longtime Jupiter resident and former executive director of the Honda Classic. Ángel Cabrera won that inaugural event. The tournament returned in 2026 for its second year, and Zach Johnson, playing his PGA TOUR Champions debut the week he turned 50, closed with a 3-under 69 for a four-shot victory. The tournament's own site now confirms a third consecutive year: March 1 through March 7, 2027, back at the Old Course, with a field of 78 PGA TOUR Champions players competing for a $2.2 million purse, televised on the Golf Channel.
The 2027 field and day-by-day pairings haven't been announced yet as of this writing. But the shape of the week, based on the last two years, has held steady enough to plan around. In 2026, it looked like this:
- Legends Shootout, a four-hole skins game pairing football Hall of Famers with golf champions. Past pairings included Brian Urlacher with Zach Johnson, Ed Reed with Darren Clarke, and Marshall Faulk with Pádraig Harrington.
- Power of Sports Wellness Festival, a free evening open to the public with a Sunset Fun Run, yoga, HIIT and Pilates classes, wellness vendors, and a dedicated area for dogs.
- Folds of Honor Friday, a themed day supporting the nonprofit that funds scholarships for the families of fallen or disabled service members and first responders. The tournament's own cornerstone charity partners, separate from that day's honoree, include Habitat for Humanity and First Tee.
The tournament also runs as a certified Zero Waste event. Trash generated over the week doesn't go to a landfill. Some of it gets repurposed into TimberTech's outdoor decking products, a fitting detail for an event that grew out of a course once associated with the TimberTech Championship.
The Wellness Festival, the fun run, the yoga and HIIT classes on the lawn, requires no ticket, no club membership, and no golf handicap. It is one of the only nights of the year the Old Course grounds are open to anyone who wants to walk onto them.
What it means for a Fairway Lake spring
Fairway Lake's single-story homes, most with their own pools, sit inside a village built around the kind of quiet, self-contained street life that country club living is supposed to offer. Golf here usually means the Club Course, a short cart ride away, not the separate property off Yamato and Military that most residents pass on the way somewhere else. Tournament week is the exception. It's the stretch each March when that other course, the one behind the higher membership tier and the tree line, becomes the most public piece of ground Broken Sound has.
Tickets and skybox details for 2027 haven't been published yet, which tracks with how the last two years worked: sales tend to open closer to the event rather than a full season out. What's confirmed now is the window, March 1 through March 7, 2027, which is enough to put on a calendar before the rest of the schedule fills in.
For anyone inside the gates who has wondered what's actually out there past the Old Course clubhouse, this is the week to find out, no initiation fee required.
If you're weighing what a home in a specific Broken Sound village means for your day-to-day life here, from club access to the calendar of events that come with it, Susan Demerer has spent 23 years building that kind of hyperlocal knowledge. Let's Connect.
