Michigan Amateur

Belvedere Golf Club sits 54 miles from the tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula in Charlevoix, a buoyant city wedged between Lake Michigan and two translucent inland lakes.

For a century, the club has provided summer escapism for golf aficionados living in mighty Midwest cities such as Detroit and Chicago. And for the last five years, superintendent Jordan Caplan has led a veteran golf maintenance team striving to provide an exerience to take those golfers back in time.

Designed by renowned architect Willie Watson, who experienced the summer dream of living and working in Charlevoix for four seasons in the late 1920s, Belvedere will host the Michigan Amateur Championship for a record 41st time this June. The event has been on the club’s calendar since Caplan arrived in northern Michigan five years ago, and he views a 156-player tournament with 36 holes of stroke play followed by six rounds of match play as a laboratory for understanding how a classic design handles elite modern players.

“It will be fun to watch,” Caplan says. “There are holes out there where you can hit it far, but you might not want to. You need the golf skillset here and you also need that golf IQ. There’s going to be quite an age gap in those who participate. I’m curious to see if the ‘veterans’ who might not hit it as far as the younger guys can a find way to get around the course maybe a little bit more intelligently.”

If conditions are favorable, the course should play as bouncy and strategic as Watson intended, because the calendar works to Belvedere’s advantage. The event is June 17-21.

“We’re looking to push it and hopefully the weather cooperates,” Caplan says. “The one thing that I have learned is that you can push grass in northern Michigan. With our cooler nights, things do bounce back. It will be a fine line between how much we are pushing it and taking into consideration that we have a remainder of a golf season to finish as well.”

Northern Michigan boasts an abundance of fabulous golf courses operating under a condensed golf calendar. On the late March afternoon Caplan discussed Belvedere’s big 2025 moment, six inches of snow covered the grounds. Belvedere typically opens during the back half of April, with summer crowds arriving around Memorial Day.

Losing a week of the peak golf season represents a big commitment for a frigid-weather club. But history inspires the Belvedere experience.

The club hosted its first Michigan Amateur in 1930. The event returned every year from 1963 through 1988. Belvedere last hosted the tournament in 2014, two years before Watson’s original drawings were discovered in a downtown Charlevoix building being demolished. The drawings guided a restoration led by northern Michigan-based architect Bruce Hepner.

So, why not celebrate Belvedere’s centennial by testing Michigan’s marvelousness on a throwback layout tipping out at under 7,000 yards?

“It’s a testament to the old-school architecture of the club,” Caplan says. “Back in the day, it was a stern test for the tournament. Even in modern times, despite its length, it’s still tricky around the greens and you have to place the ball right with your drives. It’s cool to bring in the best in the state … and it’s not going to be a pushover.”

Summer 2025 officially commences on June 20, the penultimate day of the tournament. A trip to Charlevoix to play a preserved Golden Age layout multiple times sounds like a perfect way to begin a Michigan summer. Caplan’s team embraces making those delightful memories possible.

“Almost everybody on our crew has been here since before I arrived,” he says. “And some of them have been through this tournament before back in 2014. They know how it works — and they’re excited, too. I’m excited for their hard work to be on display for that week.”