Glasson Golf Club, Ireland
The Glasson Golf Club starter asked whether I would mind pairing up with two “society” golfers, Sunday plonkers named Jack and Jimmy who had motored out from Dublin that morning with their itinerant golf gang. For me it was the end of a six-day tour of demanding Irish linksland courses on the coastlines north […]
Prairie Dunes Country Club, Kansas
Long before Sand Hills captivated golf purists, this outpost was the paragon of the links game in America’s heartland
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 […]
Plainfield Country Club, New Jersey
Scotsman Tom Bendelow, whose 1898 layout survives in part at Plainfield Country Club, bore the unfair burden of this dismissive catchphrase supposedly describing his course-design methodology. The Plainfield we’re most familiar with today is a tough-but-fair Donald Ross design, but its link to the pre-Ross era only adds to its historical significance. Most tradition-minded […]
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 […]
Granite Bay Golf Club, California
At Granite Bay Golf Club, Mark Parsinen and Robert Trent Jones Jr. have reaffirmed the value of the game’s basic principles: sound routing, clubhouse designed for golfers, old-time feel to the bunker shapes and grasses, greens designed for thoughtful approach shots and the short game, dramatic setting. In 1990 Parsinen, who later went on […]
Ocean Course at Hammock Beach Resort
Jack Nicklaus may have hailed from landlocked Columbus, Ohio, but his career has been tied to the ocean from the very earliest days. While practicing for the 1961 U.S. Amateur Championship he would go on to win, where Nicklaus first lost his heart to coastal California and the Pebble Beach Golf Links. Later, he […]
Pennard Golf Club, Wales
By Tom Doak Of all the golf courses I discovered in my year overseas studying golf architecture after college, the most unexpected find was an unknown links in southern Wales. Driving through the old gray city of Swansea, smokestacks in full force, it became clear how the course might have been overlooked for decades. […]
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 […]
Donegal Golf Club (Murvagh), Ireland
Donegal marks the entry to Ireland’s Northwest Passage through a land that’s surely the most desolate and dramatic in all the Isle. A windblown landscape of smoke-blue mountains and forlorn moors that sweep along towering cliffs above the Atlantic, this terrain is so sere and stark, sheep cannot even graze here. Against this rugged […]