Top 10 Georgia Courses You Can Play
Unfortunately for visiting golfers to Georgia, the host venue of the Tour Championship—East Lake Golf Club—is private, as are former Tour stops Atlanta Country Club, TPC Sugarloaf, and multiple-major-championship-host Atlanta Athletic Club. However, Atlanta and the rest of the Peach State boast a multitude of superb public-access layouts. Here are the 10 best courses you […]
Great Public Golf Courses Around Seattle
In his 1962 travelogue Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck wrote of his shock at seeing the rapid expansion of Seattle. He’d thought of it as a “little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background,” but it was now a place of eight-lane highways with traffic that rushed with […]
Top 10 Tennessee Courses You Can Play
Unfortunately for visiting golfers, TPC Southwind—home to the PGA Tour’s prestigious FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, Tenn.—is private, as is Memphis’s other top tournament track, the South course at Colonial Country Club. However, the Volunteer State is chock full of value-oriented, extremely scenic public-access layouts. Here are the 10 best courses you can play […]
Top 10 Minnesota Courses You Can Play
Unfortunately for visiting golfers, TPC Twin Cities—host venue to the PGA Tour’s 3M Open in the suburban Minneapolis city of Blaine—is private, as are two prominent tournament tracks in the area, Interlachen and Hazeltine National. However, the state is blessed with dozens of terrific daily-fee layouts, especially in and around Minneapolis-St. Paul and up in […]
Top 10 Jack Nicklaus Designs You Can Play
If there’s one thing that may eclipse Jack Nicklaus’s legacy as a player, it will be his legacy as a course designer. As Pete Dye once said, “It’s astonishing to me that the same guy who was gifted with the greatest golf skill of the 20th century should also be blessed with such deft creativity.” […]
6 Must-Play Public Courses in Upstate New York
The PGA Championship’s return to Oak Hill serves as a strong reminder that upstate New York offers exceptional venues for golf—and not all of them are exclusive private clubs. With Rochester as your home base, there’s no shortage of great public courses all within a 90-minute drive, some of which are significantly closer. Here, we […]
12 Surprising PGA Championship Courses You Can Play
Quail Hollow, venue for the 2025 PGA Championship, has a storied history by any measure. Unfortunately, you have to know a member to get aboard. However, if you’re looking to bask in PGA Championship lore, there are plenty of public-access layouts that will accommodate, including some that will surprise you. We’ll omit the obvious trophy […]
8 Courses on the Byron Nelson Trail You Can Play
Mid-May on the PGA Tour ushers in the AT&T Byron Nelson in suburban Dallas. The event is an homage not only to one of the greatest players ever, but also one of the classiest. Nelson captured 52 titles on the PGA Tour, including five major championships, before retiring in his prime at age 34 to […]
Beyond Bethpage: America’s Biggest Municipal Golf Properties
There are more than 11,000 golf courses in the U.S. open to public play. Approximately one quarter of those are municipal courses—or “munis”—meaning they’re owned or operated by town, county, or state governments in order to provide golf as a recreation for local residents. Among the most well-known munis are Bethpage Black, one of the […]
10 Best Public Coore & Crenshaw Courses
Bill Coore, a longtime golf course architect and Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters Tournament champion, are among the industry’s most prolific and in-demand designers when it comes to new builds. The beautiful Plantation course at the Kapalua Resort on Maui was their first design, opening in 1991, but they really made waves four years later […]