Florida Golf Monthly - Naples Beach

Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club- More vacation spots now cater to guests seeking relaxation and pampering. And in Southwest Florida, Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Resort is up to par.

Ever notice that after a five-day stay at a fabulous golf resort, you need a three-day recovery? Of course you have. It's the standard American-style vacation. We seem to forget that a vacation is a time for rest and relaxation, a time when the body, mind and soul escape together for the express purpose of doing nothing that would tax any of them. A true vacation doesn't involve bolting from one activity or attraction to the next in a race to the finish line and back to your office chair.

Whether it's the resorts, the travel agents or our overly zealous senses of adventure that led us to attempt this strange vacation strategy in the past is a moot point. Today, the trend is to take the soothing, scenic vacation route, and the resorts and travel agents have figured this out. More vacation spots than ever now cater to guests seeking relaxation and pampering. In southwest Florida, no such resort is more prominent than the Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club.

Guests of the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club find the place special for many reasons. Its ambience recalls the earlier part of this century when people flocked to Florida to luxuriate in the warm, sun-soaked beaches, to revel in the breezy informality of first-class treatment from top-resort staff and to enjoy our own favorite leisure activity: golf. When it comes to these nostalgic pleasures, the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club offers them in ample supply.

"We are a very 'guest-oriented' resort," says general manager Jim Gunderson. "We very much focus our efforts on the individual guest. We've found that we have a loyal clientele that stay with us on a regular basis. It's not that we don't want convention and group business, but we realize that our niche is in providing care and service to the individual and his or her family. We're proud of the way we serve our guests."

Don't take Gunderson's statements about individual treatment lightly. His is the philosophy upon which the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Resort was founded. In a world of corporate jive in which every statement bears interpretation, the refreshing integrity of the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Resort stands out.

This 318-room hotel with a wonderfully curious 18-hole championship golf course operates from an entirely different perspective than resorts where corporate boardroom politics and stockholder worries determine everything from the color of the clubhouse walls to the condition of the greens. Rather than a boardroom table, a dining room table was the spot where the Naples Beach Hotel & Resort philosophy first developed. That same view still drives operations today because the Watkins family, owners of the resort for the last 52 years, takes care to ensure that dining rooms always rank as more important than boardrooms.

It all began in 1946 when Henry B. Watkins, Sr., a Cincinnati, Ohio toy manufacturer, leased the property because its ambience appealed to him, and he found the resort's service unparalleled. As it was, Mr. Watkins would choose the Naples Beach Hotel as his favorite vacation spot, so when he took it over, he decided not to change a thing.

While the hotel's history seems colorful, it pales in comparison to that of the golf course. Given that golf course construction today incorporates the precision decision-making detail required to launch a NASA flight, modern mega-resorts would laugh at the genesis of the Naples Beach Hotel course as though it were a bad joke.

The first golf course associated with the resort could only be considered a course if you apply the term in its loosest sense. The early "course" looked like a sandlot version of a green &emdash; literally. It was constructed merely as a place someone could go to hit balls. Legend has it that the course offered a few decent greens, but when balls landed in the "fairway," they would disappear in the loose, white sand.

The vanishing ball concept didn't appeal to many people. Among those who protested most about it was a Cincinnati-based chemist named Allen Joslin. An avid golfer when he wasn't busy improving an insignificant little product called Jergen's lotion, Joslin complained about the course just a bit too loudly, capturing the attention of Ed Crayton, the owner of much of the surrounding real estate. Tired of listening to Joslin's harangue, Crayton asked him, "If you don't like the course, why don't you build one of your own?"

Joslin replied that he would if Crayton would sell him the land. The two men struck a deal, and Joslin created a course on the current hotel site. To this day, no one knows who designed the original layout.

At first, the course flourished, but in the late 1930s, Joslin died, and the course fell into disrepair. In 1946, the course's poor condition opened wide the door of opportunity for Henry B. Watkins, owner of the Naples Beach Hotel to the south of it. Instead of viewing the course as shabby and beyond rescue, Watkins looked at it as a possibility for the development of a first class resort.

After procuring the course, Watkins immediately renovated it and began building guest accommodations on the beachfront property beside it. The present-day 318-room resort evolved from these humble beginnings. Eventually, Watkins and his partners bought the entire property outright and later closed the Naples Beach Hotel, effectively eliminating any local competition.

Watkins put a lot of money into golf course, incorporating the latest technological innovations of the time, including the installation of the first irrigation system in all of southwest Florida. The plush new course found immediate success; people flocked to it from all over Florida and the rest of the country as well. Many credit the resort with transforming Naples into the vacation Mecca and residential haven that it is today.

In spite of the cutting edge nature of the early course, by the late 1970s, the time to update it to keep pace with the surrounding area had rolled around again. In 1981, the Watkins family brought in Lakeland architect Ron Gar to oversee the course's redesign.

Initially, Garl modernized the irrigation system, improved the greens and tees, added traps and installed rolling mounds in the fairways. Then in 1992, Hurricane Andrew provided Garl with some unexpected renovation assistance. The hurricane took down 400 trees on the property, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. To compensate for the loss, the Watkins family added 700 trees of more than 30 varieties, including 240 coconut, sabal and queen palms. They installed new shell cart paths and replaced the entire third hole, giving the course a totally new look.

Although the course measures just 6,479 yards from the back tees and offers very few forced carries over water, don't think of its challenge as minimal. The Florida PGA section annually holds its seniors' championship on the course. For the past 36 years, the Florida Senior Golf Association has held competitions here, and the annual Florida Senior Women's Golf Association Championship has been held here for the past 43 years.

Yet as impressive as the course's history may be, it's not the resort's main focal point. "We don't think of ourselves as being a golf resort," says Michael Watkins, owner and president of the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Resort and member of the third Watkins' generation to have charge of the facility. "We think of ourselves as being a resort that has a golf course. Our first duty is to care for the needs of our guests, whether it is accommodations, the beach, dining, boating, golf or just plain relaxatioon. Golf is an important part of the resort, but it isn't the only part."

All in all, Watkins, Gunderson and the rest of the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Resort management and staff team have taken on one of the most difficult tasks in the resort business: the creation of a completely laid back atmosphere in which guests can relax and rely on the best possible service. Few realize the immense challenge of maintaining an aura of serenity while jumping to fulfill the fanciest whims of every guest. Such a task can only be accomplished with consistent dedication to a philosophy of service.

At the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Resort, the consistency and high quality of the service carries over to the outstanding golf school taught by Gerry Kane. Sure, he gives some attention to the long game. But knowing that working on the long game involves some degree of stress, Kane keeps the golf school focused on the more relaxing aspects of the short game. And this emphasis on a stress-free golfing experience is right in step with the goal of the entire resort: to offer every guest the ultimate in relaxation by focusing on individual attention and service. Now that's what a resort is supposed to be.