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 White
sand beaches, emerald waters, creature comforts and tennis
all beckon.
By Roger Cox
Back
in the 1980s, the late Clarence Smith, who was then running
the Super Seniors circuit for men 80 and over, advised me
to buy real estate in the Florida Panhandle when I caught
up with him at the Tops’l Beach & Racquet Resort
in Destin. He made a case that this region sometimes called
“the Forgotten Coast” had been discovered and
was on the verge of a boom. I did not take his advice—regrettably—but
in subsequent trips to the Panhandle over the last 20 years,
I’ve witnessed an explosion of development, including
new tennis facilities, that has turned this narrow strip of
the Sunshine State atop the Gulf of Mexico into America’s
hottest coastal real estate market.
Traditionally the knock on the Panhandle has been that its
winters, while generally mild, were not warm enough to qualify
as beach weather. High season in this part of Florida is in
fact summer rather than winter. For decades this region appealed
mostly to families who drove down during July and August seeking
relief from the steamy heat of the inland Southern cities
where most of them lived. Their annual summer pilgrimage saddled
the Panhandle with the unflattering nickname “The Redneck
Riviera.” Vacation-ers flooded in by the carload to
places like Panama City Beach, whose inexpensive lodging,
all-you-can-eat restaurants, gaudy amusement parks and ubiquitous
goofy golf made it a haven for families with children. In
winter, however, the season most northerners associate with
a Florida vacation, snowbirds typically bypassed the Panhandle
in favor of balmier latitudes farther south.
No longer. At first the motivation was economic. The cost
to buy or rent in the Panhandle was significantly less than
in coastal areas farther south. Then slowly the very perception
of the region began to alter. It had always had stunning beaches,
miles of soft, sugar sand lapped by the emerald waters of
the Gulf of Mexico. What gradually sunk in was that although
only the hardiest would care to frolic in the Gulf in winter,
much of the rest of the year held ideal beach weather, and
even many winter days were mild enough for golf and tennis.
Moreover, it turned out that the excesses of Panama City Beach,
where the dunes were bulldozed in order to build hotels and
motels right along the beach, diminished or disappeared in
counties to the west. There the dunes remained intact for
the most part, and all but the oldest construction had occurred
behind the dune line.
Tennis players from outside the region first began to take
significant notice of the Panhandle in 1975, when Sandestin
Golf and Beach Resort in Destin became the first modern resort
in the nation to offer guests the opportunity to play on grass
courts and shortly thereafter the first to have all three
surfaces: hard, clay and grass. It was an effective marketing
ploy, drawing tennis journalists like me to visit a part of
the country that had otherwise never shown up on my tennis
radar. Although the tennis in the region turned out to have
dimensions I hadn’t imagined, it was still easier in
that era to find a roadside stand selling boiled peanuts than
it was to find a culinarily exciting restaurant.
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