Belvedere Golf Club, Michigan
Simple pleasures and fond memories lie at the heart of one of American golf’s great Northern outposts. Wheel into the parking lot of Belvedere Golf Club and you know right away that this place is not into pretense or status. The modest white-clapboard clubhouse sits at the far end of the lot. At the other […]
The Kingsley Club
Two high-rolling businessmen gambled on an unknown architect and came up aces with this spiritual descendant of the classic Crystal Downs
Cedar River Golf Course, Shanty Creek Resort, Michigan
The management at the Shanty Creek Resort laid out the ground rules for Tom Weiskopf’s Cedar River’s design: “Do whatever you want with the 536 acres; just save us room for a lodge.” Everything he needed was there, in excess. Masses of tall oaks and beech trees. Hills that roller-coastered across 200 feet of […]
Lost Dunes Golf Club
“That’s my goal every round I play here,” Tom Doak confesses as he lines up yet another four-foot for par. “Not to three-putt. I don’t think I’ve succeeded yet.” Doak wears a serene expression on a cloudy October day at Lost Dunes Golf Club in Bridgman, Michigan, a half-mile from Lake Michigan’s gently breaking waves […]
Champions Golf Club, Houston, Texas
For Jack Burke Jr., it is not enough for the Champions Golf Club merely to possess two of the Southwest’s most admired golf courses. For a club to be worth its salt, it first and foremost must succeed as a club. Members and employees alike must be totally committed to making every aspect of the club as good as […]
Pecan Valley Golf Club, Texas
If your name is Arnold Palmer, even your failures can give a place a reputation. At San Antonio’s Pecan Valley Golf Club, it’s been more than three decades since Palmer’s second-place finish to Julius Boros in the 1968 PGA Championship, but locals still talk about the King’s dollar-short heroics like it was yesterday. Boros, […]
River Oaks Country Club, Texas
River Oaks Country Club illustrates two of the main themes in the evolution of course design in America. Donald Ross’ original layout of 1923 was a classical example of his strategic style of design, while Joe Finger’s redesign of the late 1960s combined modern engineering with elements of the penal style to stiffen the […]
Bully Pulpit Golf Course, Medora, North Dakota
Theodore Roosevelt fed his wilderness craving in the North Dakota Badlands, hunting buffalo and ranching cattle among these stark sandstone hills. The Badlands golf experience is similarly untamed, thanks to Michael Hurdzan’s inspired 2005 design, Bully Pulpit. So captivated was Hurdzan by the dramatic property, he ditched his staff and went solo here, visiting […]
Crumpin-Fox Club, Massachusetts
The Crumpin Fox Club sits in the middle of the Pioneer Valley, 50 miles north of Springfield, Massachusetts, on the eastern edge of the Berkshires at the foot of Vermont’s Green Mountain. The club’s name derives from a local 19th century bottling firm, the Crump and Fox Soda Company, which everyone in town used to refer to as […]
Myopia Hunt Club, Massachusetts
Myopia Hunt Club wastes no time displaying its distinct and venerable virtues. A long entryway carries the visitor past Gidney Field, the oldest polo grounds in America, then alongside a private stable and kennel before reaching the front of the club’s elegant, yellow-clapboard clubhouse. There is room to breathe on this property less than […]
