Classic Course: Meadow Club

Most course-design devotees can name the last course Dr. Alister MacKenzie designed in the U.S.—Augusta National. But how many can name the first? It’s Meadow Club, in northern California. It’s not clear why the private club just north of San Francisco, which opened in 1927, flies so far under the radar. Perhaps it has something […]

Classic Course: Renegade at Desert Mountain

By James A. Frank     In 1987, when Jack Nicklaus opened the Renegade course at Desert Mountain—the first of six he’d eventually build at the luxury community in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert— it truly broke new ground. For along with typical Nicklaus features like mounding-lined fairways and a high degree of difficulty, every hole at Renegade […]

Classic Courses: California Golf Club of San Francisco

Coming up the entryway into California Golf Club of San Francisco—or, as it’s more commonly called, Cal Club—is a drive back in time. The road winds past the first fairway and up to a grand white clubhouse. There’s a main entrance, but the members know better and walk around to the side and through a […]

Classic Course: Country Club of Charleston

Rare are the moments, while playing a golf course for the first time, that you round a corner or reach the brow of a hill suddenly to come face to face with a shotmaking assignment so visually arresting that you stop dead in your tracks, speechless except perhaps for a murmured “wow.” Examples that come […]