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 […]
Metairie Country Club
The New Orleans of 1922 was booming. Streetcar carryed residents from Uptown, Metairie or Gentilly to the bustling business district by day, and when night fell, to the jazz clubs that would change the country’s music history. Ships entered the ports carrying sailors eager for landfall, and riverboats docked near the French Quarter. Perhaps […]
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 […]
Columbia Country Club, Maryland
Greens Committee chairman Walter Harban couldn’t have been happier: After a dogged four-year effort, the putting surfaces at his beloved Columbia Country Club were in top shape for the 1921 U.S. Open. The legendary Harry Vardon and the reigning U.S. Open champion, Ted Ray, had toured Columbia, located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the previous […]
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 […]