Dick Wilson laid out Bay Hill in 1961 on land wedged between the Bay Hill neighborhood and Orlando's Butler Chain of Lakes, taking a $17,000 fee for the routing and construction oversight. It was classic Wilson work — greens set just above grade for visibility and drainage, water woven through the round rather than kept at the edges — and it quietly became one of the architect's most admired designs, even before anyone famous owned it.

Arnold Palmer first played Bay Hill in 1965, in a charity exhibition, and tied the course record with a 66. He leased the club in 1970 with an option to buy, and by the mid-1970s he owned it outright. For the next four decades, until his death in 2016, Palmer kept adding length, reshaping bunkers, rebuilding greens — tinkering constantly — but he never touched Wilson's original routing. Bay Hill became, in every sense that mattered, his course.

The tournament's roots run back further, to the Florida Citrus Open that began at Rio Pinar Country Club in 1966. It moved to Bay Hill in 1979 as the Bay Hill Citrus Classic and, after a run of sponsor names, was renamed the Arnold Palmer Invitational in 2007 — a title that made explicit what had long been true. No player has owned the event the way Tiger Woods has owned the golf: he won eight times at Bay Hill, four of them in a row from 2000 through 2003, tying Sam Snead's PGA Tour record for the most wins at a single tournament.

Palmer died in 2016, and the club passed to his daughter Amy and son-in-law Roy Saunders, who still run it. The tournament he built from a citrus-belt stop into a signature PGA Tour event carries his name into every March, on the same lake-bound holes he walked for fifty years.

Museum-quality Bay Hill Club & Lodge map art, traced from real course data — every bunker, green, and fairway. Arnold Palmer's home course, host of the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Four designs, six sizes, or personalized with your own round photo.

Course data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)