Engineers Country Club, Long Island
Herbert Strong’s name today brings scant recognition. Renowned in his day as a player, teacher and course architect, the Englishman has all but been forgotten. For decades, so too was his masterpiece—Engineers Country Club, located on the north shore of Long Island, considered when it opened one of the best courses in the United […]
Friar’s Head
Among the American courses I’ve played in 50-plus years, those approaching perfection fit on a short list led by Cypress Point, where my stepfather was a member and where I first got pathologically serious about golf. Alongside it is the National Golf Links of America, my home course since college days. Pine Valley and […]
Garden City Golf Club, New York
We might say Garden City Golf Club has aged gracefully, except it hasn’t aged at all. It is a small, private club frozen in time, in the heart of a prosperous Long Island town just east of New York City. It is a place where golf simply feels more like golf, where your second step […]
Inwood Country Club
It has been generations since the Belt Parkway and Kennedy Airport bestowed their mixed blessings on the town of Inwood. Today a drive down the JFK Expressway and Rockaway Boulevard carries you past blank-looking freight warehouses and the backs of strip malls, with occasional, reassuring glimpse of scrub pines or an old bait shack. […]
Upstate New York: An Overshadowed Golf Region
When it comes to golf in the state of New York, most of the attention is focused on the New York City metropolitan area—for good reason. After all, it is home to U.S. Open sites Bethpage, Shinnecock Hills and Winged Foot, not to mention courses like National Golf Links of America, Maidstone, Garden City and Quaker Ridge that […]
Pound Ridge Golf Club, New York
Pete Dye’s courses have induced plenty of different states among golfers, from the frustration of hitting multiple shots into the water at TPC Sawgrass’ 17th hole to the elation of hitting a career drive toward the lighthouse at Harbour Town Golf Links’ 18th hole. But until now, there was one state Dye had never explored: New York. […]
Wykagyl Country Club
Measuring a mere 6,702 yards, Wykagyl Country Club does not intimidate on paper, but since it was built more than a century ago, its relentlessly hilly, rocky terrain has provided a worthy challenge for the game’s best. And if not for a location in the heart of New York’s golf-rich Westchester County, where neighbors […]
Huntsville Golf Club, Pennsylvania
More than any single redesign project in U.S. history, Jones’ work on The Country Club displayed the virtues of turning back the clock to an era of natural looking mounds, swales and flow lines. Rather than imposing himself on the course, Jones allowed the site and its original features to set the tone for his work. Indeed, he was most successful at The Country […]
Inniscrone Golf Club, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia’s Main Line is home to such museum pieces as Hugh Wilson’s Merion East, and the William Flynn-Howard Toomey collaborations at Manufacturers and Philadelphia Country Club’s Spring Mill course. Any new course along this real estate certainly draws comparisons to these classics. But at Inniscrone Golf Club, Gil Hanse and his associates, Jim Wagner […]
A Round at Oakmont Country Club
Lee Trevino once said that “there’s only one course in the country where you can step out right now and play the U.S. Open, and that’s Oakmont.” He later added that first they had to slow down the greens. You’ll get no disagreement here. I played Oakmont for the first time last August and I felt like I […]