This $50 million private course with no members welcomes college event

This week’s inaugural Abilene Christian Intercollegiate will be a must-watch, largely because of the venue.

Halbert National is a $50 million Tom Fazio design built for billionaire David D. Halbert in Granbury, Texas, about 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth. It is owned and fully funded by one man, Halbert, and has no members or tee times.

“If you don’t have a hole named after you then you’re not a member,” Halbert told Forbes last year, shortly after the 185-acre project was completed.

The origin of the course: Halbert built a lake house on Lake Granbury in the early 2000s and later purchased land on the other side of the lake. When Halbert’s wife, Kathy, whom he met while both attended Abilene Christian, expressed that she wished she had somewhere to play golf where nobody could watch her, David went beyond her expectations.

“I just wanted this little thing where if I didn't have anybody behind me and I could swing like an idiot,” Kathy Halbert told Forbes, thinking that a three-hole, par-3 course would suffice.

David Halbert, the 70-year-old founder of A.I. genomics company Caris Life Sciences, instead called Fazio, a friend who’d designed, among many other top courses, Dallas National, where Halbert is also a member. Halbert’s request: “Make me the most beautiful golf course in Texas.”

Since Fazio’s initial design of Halbert National – par 72, 7,542 yards – the course has been lengthened with the addition of several new tee boxes; Halbert’s goal is to have the layout tip out at 7,777 yards. In the past year, Halbert has also added a lodge, cabins and party barn, where he said he’d love his granddaughter to get married one day. He is also commissioning a more formal driveway into the course.

Forbes reported that Halbert National’s annual maintenance cost is around $3 million as Halbert says, “I want it to be nicer than Augusta.”

While Halbert National was built for Halbert’s family and friends, invitations to play have been extended not only to this week’s collegiate field, which includes Texas A&M, Arizona, SMU and Houston on the men’s side and Oregon, Arizona State, Tennessee and Baylor on the women’s side, but also several PGA Tour pros, including Dallas native Jordan Spieth.

Spieth recently appeared in a commercial for Caris that was filmed at Halbert National and promotes the company’s multi-cancer early detection test, Caris Detect, which analyzes a person’s entire genome and transcriptome from a single blood draw.

The Abeline Christian Intercollegiate will take place Monday-Wednesday and be broadcasted live on Golf Channel from 4-7 p.m. ET each day.