Every March, television trucks roll through the gates at Broken Sound, grandstands rise near the 18th green, and a Golf Channel broadcast crew sets up shop for three straight nights. If you didn't know better, you might assume all of this unfolds in someone's backyard, that a homeowner somewhere along the fairway spends tournament week peering over a hedge at Ángel Cabrera lining up a putt. That assumption would be wrong, and the reason why says more about how this community was actually built than any brochure does.
The Old Course at Broken Sound, the layout that hosts the PGA TOUR Champions every spring, was designed with no residential lots touching it at all. It is, in the club's own description, a pure core golf course without housing, tucked into the interior of the property and separated entirely from the 27 villages that make up the rest of the community. If you live in one of those villages, the course you actually see day to day is the Club Course, the layout built in 1985 specifically to run through the heart of the neighborhood. The tournament that puts Broken Sound on national television every March happens on the one piece of ground here that was never meant to have a house on it.
Two Courses, One Very Different Relationship to the Neighborhood
That split is easy to miss if you're only looking at membership brochures, which tend to talk about "two championship golf courses" as if they're interchangeable. They aren't, and the difference matters if you're trying to picture what tournament week actually does to daily life inside the gates.
The Old Course opened in 1978 under architect Joe Lee, got a renovation from Gene Bates in 2004, and then underwent a full redesign by Rees Jones that reopened in the spring of 2023. Jones has more than 260 golf courses to his name, including work on seven U.S. Open venues, and his mandate at Broken Sound was to sharpen a course that already had no housing to work around. The result is what the club calls a golfer's sanctuary, hidden in the interior of the property, with no homes lining the track at any point.
The Club Course tells the opposite story. Also a Joe Lee design, it opened in 1985 and was renovated by Bates and Matt Swanson in 2017. It runs through the residential fabric of the community by design, and its Juniors Golf Program is one of the things that draws younger families to Broken Sound in the first place. If you're picturing your daily walk to the mailbox past a fairway, that's the Club Course you're picturing, not the one on Golf Channel.
What Actually Happens During Tournament Week
The event itself is the James Hardie Pro Football Hall of Fame Invitational, and 2026 was its second year at Broken Sound after debuting in April 2025. For its second edition, the tournament moved up four weeks on the calendar, landing on March 2 through March 8, the week directly following the Cognizant Classic at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens.
Tournament week has a rhythm that repeats itself:
- Wednesday and Thursday (March 4-5 in 2026): Pro-Am rounds, where 52 NFL players join amateur golfers on the Old Course
- Friday and Saturday: The 78-player Champions Tour field continues its 54-hole stroke play event while 26 Pro Football Hall of Famers compete separately in a two-man best ball format over those same two days
- Sunday: The final round of stroke play, Champions Tour players only, deciding the $2.2 million purse
- Programming throughout the week includes a Women's Day and a Legends Shootout alongside the Pro-Ams
The 2026 field included three players making their PGA TOUR Champions debuts: two-time major champion Zach Johnson, five-time PGA TOUR winner Ben Crane, and 2017 Sanderson Farms Championship winner Ryan Armour. On the football side, Tim Brown returned to defend his 2025 title against first-time participants Emmitt Smith and Brian Urlacher. Cabrera came back too, defending the win that had also earned him his first PGA TOUR Champions victory and full exempt status on the tour.
None of this required closing off a residential street or setting up a grandstand outside anyone's front door, because the course hosting it was never inside the residential loop to begin with.
"Year one was a tremendous success bringing together the legends of golf and football in an unprecedented way," said Ken Kennerly, the tournament's Executive Director, ahead of the 2026 edition.
Why the Field Got Stronger in Year Two
The four-week calendar shift wasn't cosmetic. By scheduling the Broken Sound event immediately after the Cognizant Classic, tournament organizers positioned it to catch players who were already in Florida for the prior week's stop, a scheduling logic that Yahoo Sports reported was expected to draw a stronger field to Palm Beach County than the tournament's original April date allowed. That's a plausible explanation for why three players chose Broken Sound for their Champions Tour debuts in year two rather than waiting for a stop closer to home.
It's a small piece of tournament logistics, but it's the kind of detail that explains why the event felt like a bigger deal in its second year than its first, without anyone at the club needing to say so directly.
The Sustainability Record Underneath the Cameras
Broken Sound has been part of the PGA TOUR Champions calendar in some form since 2007, when the Old Course began hosting the TimberTech Championship. That tournament paused while Rees Jones reworked the layout, and when the Old Course reopened in 2023, the club moved on to an entirely new event, the James Hardie Pro Football Hall of Fame Invitational, which debuted in 2025. Through both tournaments, the courses have carried Audubon Sanctuary Certification, and the Old Course specifically holds GEO Certification, making it the first golf facility in Florida, second in the United States, and 14th in the world to earn that designation from the Golf Environment Organization.
The club also built the first industrial composting project in Florida, turning organic waste from the two courses and the clubhouse kitchens into topdressing material for the fairways. That composting operation predates the current tournament by more than a decade, which means the sustainability record on display every March isn't something assembled for television. It's infrastructure the club had already built for its own maintenance program, long before a national broadcast crew ever needed a reason to mention it.
What's Already on the Calendar for March 2027
The tournament isn't a one-off. Its third edition at Broken Sound is confirmed for March 1 through March 7, 2027, which means the rhythm of Pro-Ams early in the week, football legends on Friday and Saturday, and a Sunday finish for the Champions Tour field will repeat again next spring.
For residents who want to be part of it without a ticket, the tournament runs its own volunteer program through a registration portal, with a uniform package covering shirts and a hat for the week. Proceeds from the event support Habitat for Humanity and First Tee among its beneficiaries, giving the tournament a community dimension that outlasts the three days of competitive golf.
The bigger takeaway for anyone living inside the gates is simpler than a golf calendar. The course that turns Broken Sound into a national broadcast every March was built specifically to keep that spectacle separate from the villages people actually live in. The neighborhood you experience day to day, on the Club Course side of the property, stays exactly as quiet in March as it is every other month.
If you're curious what daily life looks like in the villages that actually border the golf, or want a firsthand walk through Broken Sound before the next tournament week rolls around, The De Marzo Luxury Group can arrange a private tour and community introduction.
