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Trump National Doral's Blue Monster is the flagship of a four-course resort in Doral, Florida, originally designed by Dick Wilson and opened in January 1962 as the Blue Course at the Doral Hotel and Country Club. Raymond Floyd restored the course in 1996, and Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner carried out a far more extensive rebuild in 2013-14 after Donald Trump's purchase of the resort, reshaping greens and bunkers on most of the layout while leaving the famous 18th hole untouched. The course plays to a par of 72 and measures 7,739 yards from its championship tees.
Water comes into play on nearly every hole, most notably down the closing stretch: the par-3 15th requires a carry to a peninsula green, the reachable par-4 16th now has water along the fairway, and the water-lined par-4 18th has been ranked by Golf Magazine among its Top 100 Holes in the World. The Blue Monster hosted a PGA Tour event continuously from 1962 to 2016, under the names Doral Open, Doral-Ryder Open, and WGC-Cadillac Championship, then became the venue for LIV Golf's season-ending Team Championship from 2022 to 2024. The PGA Tour returned to Doral in 2026 with a new Signature Event, the Cadillac Championship.
The course is a resort golf course. It plays to par 72, 7,078m (7,739 yards). Designed by Dick Wilson, the course originally opened in 1962. It is semi-private, welcoming both members and visitors. On-site facilities include Pro Shop, Golf Lessons, Restaurant, Social Membership, Junior Membership, Corporate Membership.
Long before golfers nicknamed it a "monster," the land at Doral was better known for swamp water than fairways. In the late 1950s, New York real estate developer Alfred Kaskel and his wife Doris bought roughly 2,400 acres of low-lying terrain west of Miami, betting a golf resort could be built on it. The name Doral is itself a blend of their first names.
When the resort opened on January 12, 1962, it carried three courses: the Blue, the Red, and a par-3 Green. Dick Wilson, whose other credits include Cog Hill and Royal Montreal, designed the Blue Course, and building a stern test through swampland is one of several theories golfers cite for how it became the "Blue Monster" — others point to its blue tee markers or the water that comes into play on nearly every hole. Kaskel wasted no time establishing the club's pedigree: the resort's first PGA Tour event arrived in just its second year of operation, in 1962, when Billy Casper held off rookie Paul Bondeson by a single stroke.
Kaskel personally raised the purse from $35,000 to $50,000 to lure a field that included Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead.
Wilson's routing put a premium on ball-striking under pressure, working water into the terrain rather than around it — a strategy that became the course's identity, and one that has been revisited twice since. In 1996, Raymond Floyd and Ted McAnlis, who had already reworked the resort's Gold Course the year before, restored the Blue Monster and pushed its bunker count from 106 to 117; the changes were unpopular enough with touring pros that several bunkers were removed a few years later to restore a more traditional look. The larger transformation followed Donald Trump's 2012 purchase of the resort.
Gil Hanse, working with longtime design partner Jim Wagner, rebuilt the course starting in March 2013, reshaping greens and repositioning bunkers across 14 of the 18 holes. Trump described the result as "a new golf course, not a re-do"; Hanse told Golf Digest that twelve holes had significant changes, either in direction or through new water hazards. The par-3 15th became a peninsula green demanding a full carry over water, and more water was brought into range of the reachable par-4 16th.
The 18th, already regarded as one of the best finishing holes in golf, was left alone.
The club changed hands several times before Trump's involvement. Kaskel's Carol Management sold a majority stake in 1994 to KSL Recreation; CNL Hospitality acquired KSL a decade later and placed the resort under Marriott management; Morgan Stanley's real estate arm bought CNL in 2007. A creditor group led by Paulson & Co.
took control in 2011 and put the resort into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Trump Organization bought it out of bankruptcy in February 2012 for $150 million, renamed it Trump National Doral, and spent more than $200 million renovating the resort's four courses and hotel over the following several years. The Blue Monster reopened for play in December 2013, with a formal reopening in February 2014; its yardage grew from roughly 7,125 to 7,450 yards immediately after the redesign, and further tee additions since have pushed the championship tees out to the 7,739 yards used for tournament play today.
Doral's tournament history is one of the longest continuous relationships between a golf course and the PGA Tour. The Blue Monster hosted a Tour event every year from 1962 to 2016 — as the Doral Open, Doral-Eastern Open, Doral-Ryder Open, and finally the WGC-Cadillac Championship — putting it among only nine courses that have appeared on Tour for more than half a century, alongside venues such as Augusta National, Pebble Beach and Riviera. Champions there include Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Nick Faldo, Greg Norman (three times) and Tiger Woods, whose four Doral wins included three in a row from 2005 to 2007.
Stephen Ames still holds the course record, a 61 shot in the second round of the 2000 Doral-Ryder Open. After the WGC event moved to Mexico City in 2017, the Blue Monster became the venue for LIV Golf's season-ending Team Championship in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and the PGA Tour returned to Doral in 2026 with a new Signature Event, the Cadillac Championship.
The Blue Monster now operates as the marquee course of a four-course resort — alongside the Golden Palm, Red Tiger and Silver Fox — open to resort guests, daily-fee visitors and members of Trump National Doral Golf Club. It continues to be measured against its tournament past: when the PGA Tour returned in 2026, it did so under new event branding that does not carry forward the old Doral Open/WGC record book, even though the course itself is largely the Hanse redesign that reopened more than a decade earlier.
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