Panmure Golf Club, Scotland
No plaque exists on either the 2nd or 17th fairways at Panmure Golf Club commemorating the time spent there by a golf legend more than 50 years ago. And that’s just the way Ben Hogan would want it—keeping the focus purely on golf at one of Scotland’s finest yet lesser-known courses. Panmure was already […]
Tain Golf Club, Scottish Highlands
In a secluded corner of the Scottish Highlands, on nearly the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska, lays a golf course of compelling beauty, fascinating history and beguiling challenge. This is Tain, the oldest royal burgh in Scotland and where the steeply winding streets and medieval walls echo a colorful and ancient past. This is where […]
Cabo del Sol Desert Course, Mexico
Tom Weiskopf faced a couple of stiff challenges in designing the Desert course at Cabo del Sol, the 1,800-acre resort and residential playground located at the tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. First, he had a tough act to follow. The Ocean course—Cabo del Sol’s first layout, designed by fellow Ohio State alum Jack Nicklaus—is […]
Essex Golf & Country Club, Canada
During the 1920s Donald Ross embarked on a crisscross of North America, laying out new golf courses and remodeling old ones. Of the nearly 400 courses Ross designed and/or remodeled, no more than 11 were in Canada. Two of those are in Windsor, Ontario, a blue-collar town on the south shore of the Detroit […]
Redtail Golf Club, Canada
The toughest part is finding the place. There are no markers for the front gate. Road signage is minimal. The farm country of lower Ontario, Canada, scarcely provides any sense of identifiable landmarks to visitors. Redtail Golf Club opened in 1992, before it was fashionable to talk about “minimalism” in course design. The name […]
The Royal Montreal Golf Club, Canada
Founded in 1873, Royal Montreal is the oldest golf club in North America, and many of its regulations are charmingly old fashioned in this 21st-century golf world. For example, golfers can wear shorts, but only in combination with high-top socks. Royal Montreal’s 80,000-square-foot clubhouse, tastefully festooned throughout with first-rate golf memorabilia and illustrations, oozes […]
Toronto Golf Club, Canada
The Toronto Golf Club keeps its own cutting garden, furnishing fresh bouquets for dispersal throughout its English manor-style clubhouse. Built in 1913, the clubhouse lies at the end of a half-mile, tree-lined road that winds past a classic Harry Colt-designed course. The club’s wooded grounds lie but a mile off the exit of a […]
Capilano Golf and Country Club, Canada
A Stanley Thompson masterpiece in Vancouver, Canada
Golf de Morfontaine, France
Eighty years ago, if you lived in Europe, had some land and some money, and wanted to build a top-quality golf course, the go-to guy was Tom Simpson—assuming you could put up with his act. Picture yourself, the course owner, at a site visit. You’re out on a boggy moor in your tweeds and […]
Belvoir Park Golf Club, Northern Ireland
In the early ’90s, when Yanks began descending en masse on Ireland’s mightiest links, they first gathered at the magisterial courses of the southwest (think Ballybunion and Lahinch), then east coast wonders like Portmarnock and the European Club, and more recently, the raw and secluded northwest. But without direct flights to Belfast and scared […]
