Playboy! Fazio! And the incredible story of a fabled course risen from the dead

VERNON TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Dave Brubaker, the guy who knows all of the secrets here, thinks you’ll like this one. You stop the cart. 

“You see it? On the silo?”

Hmm. Maybe? There’s something there, in black, but it’s faded now. Brubaker sees you’re struggling. 

“Here. Stand here. See it? See the ears?”

Oh yeahhhh. Wow. That’s … 

“The logo,” he finishes. “It used to be the old horseback-riding area.”

You laugh, and you and Brubaker continue on. It’s an early fall day at Great Gorge Golf Club, and there are other reminders on the property, just over an hour north of the Big Apple. Some are subtle, like the hole flags that also had the logo, though Brubaker, the 70-year-old groundskeeper, keeps those tucked away in his shed. The grill room at Great Gorge is called Hef’s Hut, too. And one huge hint sits idly, yards from a few of the holes, right beside the parking lot. 

That’s a former Playboy Club.

For a while, the mega-resort hosted everyone — actors and actresses, entertainers and personalities, including the owner, Hugh Hefner, the man behind the Playboy brand himself — and the property offered seemingly everything. Restaurants. Clubs. Shops. On and on and on. And a gem of a golf facility, 27 holes, all laid out by a well-known uncle and his nephew.

But then Hef sold the joint. And eventually the resort shut down. 

And the golf facility closed, too. And grass and weeds and bears moved in.  

So how are you out here today, looking at a silo brandished with a faded Playboy Bunny logo? And eating a cheeseburger at Hef’s Hut? And playing golf? When courses close, they often are buried. For good. But here?

Brubaker and a few other folks think you’d like to hear about that, too. 

But first, you gotta hear about what it once was. Jeff Koffman remembers. With his family, he went as a kid. 

And maybe no memory of the former Playboy Club tops this one, as it beautifully walks a line between humor and risque awkwardness.

You know where this is headed. 

“I must have been about 6 or 7 years old,” the golf club’s managing partner said, “and I remember my older brother, who’s my partner, David — I remember the Bunny, like this woman had the big cottontail. ‘Is that a bunny?’ 

“I just remember being confused. And my brother smiling.”

So, yes, to address the rabbit in the room, the club had the ooh la la, though it was intended to be more than a peep show. Much more. Koffman also remembers skiing and playing tennis. Brubaker saw both a boxing match and comedian George Carlin in one of the ballrooms. He watched a concert in the indoor tennis facility. Opened in 1972, the New Jersey club was one of the biggest and best of those that Hefner opened around the world. Think a ’70s Vegas casino. (The rumors were that the facility was, in fact, all geared up for potential gambling.) 

Better yet, have a look yourself. The videos below are wonderfully promotional, yet still capture the vibe (as does this piece here, from northjersey.com columnist Ann Genader, or these pictures here, from the Playboy Online Museum).

Don’t worry, everything is safe for work. We’ll wait. 

Then there’s the golf.

Hefner brought in a 20-something designer and his uncle, who drove in from their relatively new digs in suburban Philadelphia to work on the facility. It figured to be a challenge, the job being a piece in this glamorous production, under the eye of a certain magazine publisher. You wonder what that was like. 

Would Tom Fazio even remember?

The now-78-year-old, whose hands have gone on to touch some of the greatest courses in the world, laughed. 

“Like yesterday.” 

“Like yesterday? All right!” 

“Fortunately, I’ve got a good recall memory,” he said over the phone from North Carolina. “And somehow my early projects, I remember almost everything about them.” 

You have so many questions, though you begin with a simple follow-up: What does Fazio remember? And for the next 10 minutes, he talks uninterrupted. He and his uncle George, who also developed an extensive portfolio before his death, started Great Gorge work in the late ’60s. Tom remembers the hotel. He also remembers the thought of gambling. He says they signed on through their work at Butler National just outside of Chicago, which is where Hefner HQ had been. 

Fazio even remembers his construction development director (“Michael Reibman, R-e-i-b-m-a-n — became a friend of mine”) and the contractor (“Nielsen Construction Company — because they’d never built a golf course before”). Together, they shaped three nines, and they’re honestly named. The Lake is water-filled. The Quarry is rock-based. The Rail plays around rail tracks. And with them. Few holes anywhere are more memorably quirky than the par-3 3rd at Rail, where the Fazios didn’t touch seven, 12-foot-tall concrete pieces of a defunct railroad track. They’re in a bunker. You get no relief. Good luck. Back then, even with the Playboy bucks, course budgets were tighter than they are today, so Fazio says you got creative. And that was that. And the Rail 3rd is the property’s signature hole.  

Which of course you try. 

Let’s continue. At various points, Fazio calls the project fun and exciting. You have another question. It’s maybe obvious. 

But, no, Fazio didn’t collaborate with Hef. They talked just once. 

“Just looking at it from a distance, that would seem to be one of the more ‘interesting’ owners that you’ve worked for?”

“Well, you know, honestly I think if you want to make a story of it, you could,” Fazio said. “To me, it wasn’t that — OK, it sounded good working for Playboy back at the time. There were six, seven million copies of their magazine a month. That was big time. That was big publishing then, as well. It would probably be big today if anybody did that. … 

“So it’s interesting. I know you’re trying to develop a story, it sounds like it’s good, but it sounded good at the time. But for me, the great thing about it was creating great golf and having a project like that, because there weren’t many big projects so from my side of golf design, this was a great job for us.”

Interestingly, before he hangs up, Fazio says he wants to take his sons out to visit Great Gorge. Show ’em dad’s work. He says you can tag along. You’d love that, he says. Of course, you would. 

You’re in David Killin’s office now. He’s the course general manager. And you wonder if he’s heard of any of the history. 

Yes, in a way. 

“People will say to us on the phone, ‘Which golf course is this?’” he says. “Because we do have other golf courses that are so close, and we’ll say, ‘At the old Playboy Hotel.’ 

“And everybody knows where that is.”

You want to know more now. 

“When you say that, what’s the initial reaction? Is there a laugh? Tell me!”

“I think the best thing is, when I say I work at the old Playboy Hotel Golf Course, the first thing people say is, I know someone that either went there, worked there, their brother worked there, my father had a Golden Key — there’s always a story from that person, whether it’s 20 minutes long or 30 seconds long, of they want to tell you the connection that they have with this property.” 

“What’s an example of a 20-minute story?

“I’ve had some guys that are in their 70s, late 70s, who would tell stories of coming here and listening to the entertainment and music. It was just the happening place, and if you were able to come here, then you were in the cool crowd. 

“It was a neat destination that people would brag about being a part of.” 

Was. 

For this part, you must find Great Gorge’s heart. Because you wonder. 

Killin cautions you, though, that Brubaker isn’t overly poetic, but that’s OK, because when folks like him speak, it isn’t fluffy, and Brubaker most certainly is not a BS’er. He’s the genuine article. Salt of the earth. Interestingly, the superintendent’s other love is basketball. All levels. He had tickets when the Big East was more tackle football than hoops. His ears perk up when you tell him you went to Marquette. He remembers Al McGuire. Butch Lee. Bo Ellis. Brubaker, at 70, still plays too. Twice a week. Don’t let him cook.   

But that comes only when the day’s done. The son of a farmer has a sun-up, sun-down ethos, and he’s toiled harder than a tractor since he arrived in 1982, shortly after Hefner sold the Club. Ownership passed through a few more hands from there, and the popularity and upkeep fell, but the golf course didn’t under Brubaker’s watch. No way. He was as steady as his jump shot.

It didn’t matter. The course closed in 2014. The Club stopped operations in 2018, according to reports. There are various reasons for both, but we’ll leave it at that. 

And Brubaker was told that, after 32 years, it was just, poof, over. Turn out the lights. Lock the doors. Don’t let them hit you in the backside that never sat. 

What the hell do you do?

Maybe this. 

In sadness, this is good, if you’re romantic at all about golf. If you believe people connect with golf courses. 

Brubaker kept coming back to Great Gorge. 

He had taken another superintendent job, but this was still home.   

“You know, this golf course is so beautiful, it never gets old,” Brubaker says. “I’ve been here for 40 years, and I still just look and say, wow, this is just — it’s breathtaking. It’s such a beautiful property.” 

“I’m thinking you know every blade of grass out here. To not be able to take care of it anymore when it shut down, what was that feeling like?”

“It was tough,” he said. “I live 10 minutes away. I’d come over in the wintertime just to come over to the golf course, to be out here on the property. You know, walking around with my border collie or cross country skis. And then the tough thing was … it got to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore. It was just starting to grow up in weeds, and you just never thought it would reopen again. I thought that was the end of it.” 

“Why did you come back and walk?”

“I guess I missed the place.” 

“When you were out walking when the course was closed, did you have any kind of hope that it would reopen?”

“Oh, I guess I always did, but just knowing the facts that when a course closes, typically it doesn’t reopen as a golf course.”

So then you wonder when he, of all people here, got the call that it was back on. Koffman and his group, owners of nearby Mountain Creek resort, bought Great Gorge Golf Club in 2016. They saw an opportunity.  

Actually, you probably know how Brubaker’s conversation went.  

He had missed 700-some days of work. It hurt more than a shank on a crisp fall day in these mountains. 

For a year, Brubaker and others dug and pulled and carried. He says a few weeds coulda played center in his pickup basketball games. He has no idea how many trucks hauled out junk. But they kept filling them. Koffman said he and a friend saw a bear during the early days. Below, you can see some of the work that was needed.

You and Brubaker are now standing on the first tee of the Rail Course. It’s a pretty downhill par-4. The colors pop. Nothing is out of place. The facility is humming, with play costing between $29 and $65 during the week, and between $39 and $105 during the weekend. You ask Brubaker if he remembers the first day back, in 2017. He does. You ask him if he played that day. Nope. Not even hit a shot? Nope. 

He’s just happy you might have played. And today you are. So yeah, he’s back. Great Gorge is back.  

After a day on the course, you’re in Hef’s Hut. The restaurant has opened recently. On the deck, an outing that has finished up is handing out prizes. Two dudes are playing darts, though one is strangely throwing his like a football. Whatever. All of this is on a Monday. As for next week? And next month? And next year? It’s good to be thinking about that, everyone says. Koffman laughs that he’s a dreamer, and his team doesn’t argue that. There’s talk of doing everything here. Events. Concerts. Park golf. As for the resort, it’s wait and see. There’s hope it will be sold and developed. And then who knows what happens. 

So you have one more question then. 

What would Hef say about his old 27-holer? And its rise back to how it looked in those videos and how Fazio remembered it? And its return to how Brubaker likes it?

Koffman and Killin think about this one for a few beats.

“The fact that it’s reopened after closing,” Killin says, “I think he probably would be proud of that because that was the last he had, that was the last thing of this property. … When the golf course closed, the property was dead, 100 percent dead. 

“So to revitalize the golf course maybe would give him a glimmer of hope that maybe someday the resort will be turned into not what it was, but something new age.” 

Koffman adds this:

“That he always knew it was a beautiful asset.”