If there is a golfing version of baseball’s Field of Dreams it has to be Canyata in eastern Illinois.
Auto racing magnate Jerry Forsythe had the course built as an executive golf retreat for family and friends two decades ago. There is a very short list of those who have had the opportunity to log a round at the secluded layout set amidst 450 acres of Midwestern farmland in Marshall, Illinois.
“I think in the 20 years he has allowed some people to play it maybe it has done a total of 5,000 rounds,” said Icon Golf president and founder Jeff Goodsell, whose parent firm, Texas-based Escalante Golf, recently purchased the club listed on Golf Digest’s America’s 100 Greatest Courses. “I mean literally nobody has seen how magical this place is.”
That’s about to change when the course reopens in May as golfers looking for access to a network of high-end clubs across the United States via an Icon national membership will be able to call Canyata its home club.
The fee to join Icon Golf is $25,000 and the membership roll of 700 is growing quickly now that word is out about the Canyata purchase, Goodsell says.
“Obviously the world of Icon Golf has a lot to offer beyond Canyata, but to be able to get into a Golf Digest top 100 course at our current price point is the absolute best deal in golf. There’s no doubt about it,” Goodsell says.
Canyata was designed by Illinois-based architect Michael Benkusky, a course that in 2005 was named Golf Digest’s No. 2 Best Private Course. The layout, with its difficult 76.1 rating and 150 slope, has been cloaked in virtual secrecy ever since.
What began as a four-hole family fantasy of Forsythe’s morphed into nine holes and then 18. The course took close to four years to build. Fairways averaged more than 50 yards across and greens averaged more than 7,000 square feet.
“It wasn’t the easiest site because a lot of it was dead flat, you know just a flat central Illinois farm field,” Benkusky says. “But there were a lot of good hardwood trees through some nice ravines.”
To add some definition to the flat site, an estimated 2 million cubic yards of dirt was moved to design Canyata, which is just four miles off Interstate 70 but is hidden from view.
“We built 20-foot berms on the edge of holes so nobody could see there was a golf course there,” Benkusky says. In addition, he also dropped the green and raised up the tee box on the 247-yard 12th hole to create a 40-foot elevation change out of a flat piece of land.
It is estimated that Canyata cost in the neighborhood of $20 million to build.
“Did we have an unlimited budget? Probably, or maybe Mr. Forsythe had a budget but he didn’t tell us what it was going to be,” Benkusky says, laughing. “He was the type of person that if you didn’t hear anything you knew everything was going good. I appreciated that kind of trust. I looked at it as even though he’s paying for it I’m going to build it in the way that I know I would be happy with it if it was my golf course and I was the one owning it. So I kind of took pride into that thinking, and it turned out to be a terrific project.”
Now in his 80s, Forsythe, one of the former owners of the Champ Car World Series, hit it off with the Escalante executives in a Chicago meeting in late 2024 and was comfortable the firm would carry on Canyata’s vision of a so-called “family atmosphere.”
“The only people that will ever play Canyata moving forward are Icon Golf members and their invited guests,” Goodsell says. “There’s no unaccompanied play, there’s no reciprocal play. We want to maintain something that is very exclusive, yet also is a very warm and welcoming environment. So it’s one of those places where it’s going to be hard to get in, but once you’re in it’s magical in the sense of bringing people together, the customer service and the touchpoints — and obviously the uniqueness and the quality of the golf course.”
The course itself is secluded, but Goodsell believes it is positioned in a perfect location to be dubbed Icon’s home course.
“The neat thing was, as we got the map out for our marketing strategy, there were about eight cities within 300-400 miles of Canyata,” he says. “By design the course sits out of the middle of nowhere but it will be an easy drive for golfers from cities such as Indianapolis, Louisville, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Nashville, Detroit, Kansas City and Memphis.”
Goodsell says there will be no tee times, no tee markers and a caddy program, sort of an “old school” feel.
“We want no more than 40 people on site per day,” he says. “We feel like that’s a really nice mix of providing a really cool, yet exclusive, experience. And you’ll never hear us call it Canyata Golf Club. It’s just Canyata.”
On the drawing board is a dozen 4-bedroom homes to house Icon members.
“I consider myself a little bit of a golf junkie, and I’ve played a lot of really cool places and seen a lot of neat stuff, but Jerry and Michael really built this course as a family playground,” Goodsell says. “I can only imagine what their first conversations were like, and once they started building it they discovered now good it could be.
“I’ve been telling people it’s the type of place you go and you just kind of melt into nature. You don’t even know what day of the week it is. You don’t care what time it is. You forget about your phone and emails and voicemails. It’s a full detox. You just unwind and relax and just take it in. There are no sounds, and when you’re on the course you can’t even see another hole. You feel like you’re the only person on the planet, which I think is the magic of it.”