The Royal St. George’s Golf Club, England
The founding of England’s first major-championship golf venue might easily have been dubbed the Great Escape of 1887. It was conducted by a group of frustrated golfers from Wimbledon Common in the suburbs of London, where the game was played by two golf clubs on the same course—in opposite directions. The search for new ground […]
Wentworth Club, Surrey, England
South of London, the Wentworth Club boasts two world-class layouts. The East was laid out in 1924 by Harry Colt, the father of British course architecture. Colt ran the East through a forest of fir and silver birch that afforded a natural sense of isolation. Patches of purple heather lined the fairways and large […]
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 […]
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 […]
North Berwick Golf Club, Scotland
The vast majority of golfers, even those natives of the game’s homeland who ought to know better, mention of East Lothian generally brings the knee-jerk response of “Muirfield, magnificent Muirfield.” Yet in historical terms, the present home of the ancient Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers is a Johnny-come-lately upstart on the peerless stretch of […]
The Country Club, Brookline, Massachusetts
In historical significance, The Country Club takes a back seat to no other. It was, in fact, the very first “country club” in the U.S., dating to 1882, and this suburban Boston club was one of the five founding members of the U.S. Golf Association. And it has been the scene of some of […]
Tom Doak Redesign of San Francisco Golf Club
Nearly six decades ago, the city of San Francisco announced plans to build a freeway abutting the eastern border of the property that makes up San Francisco Golf Club. Faced with such an intrusion, the intensely private club set out to rework the three holes nearest to the road on the only A.W. Tillinghast […]
A History of Pasatiempo Golf Club
The opening of any golf course represents an ending as well as a beginning—the end of a long struggle to identify the land, to carve the course out of its raw potential. But Pasatiempo represents a more poignant end than most, because it was the last great course of the Roaring ’20s, opening just […]
