The Golf Club at Bridgewater in Lakeland

There's nothing like a brand new golf course, especially when you know it's going to grow up to be a star. The Golf Club at Bridgewater in Lakeland, Fla. is younger than new: It hasn't even been born yet. Actually, that isn't technically true. The course itself is raring to go; it just needs someone to play it.

The course is inside the Bridgewater development, just off Interstate 4 in Lakeland. It's surrounded by acres and acres of empty land, most of it marked with stakes. As of December 2006 construction had started on only a few homes; for the most part, there's only dirt playing in the seemingly never-ending wind superintendent Sean Klotzbach described as "brutal."

He could have been describing the course itself, or at least the front nine. Steve Smyers, an architect well-known for his work in Florida golf, took land that had been abused for years as a phosphate mining site and turned it into something more useful - for golfers at least - and certainly more aesthetically pleasing.