The PGA Championship returns to Valhalla Golf Club this week for the fourth time. Valhalla might not have the history or gravitas of other PGA Championship venues like Oak Hill, Southern Hills, Baltusrol or Medinah #3, but what it lacks in prestige it more than makes up for with its knack for producing dramatic finishes. Read more…
Leading up to the 1953 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club, the USGA and club officials clashed over Oakmont’s use of its heavy, wide-tined bunker rakes. The governing body, as well as many U.S. Open participants, complained that the deep furrows the rakes made were overly penal and inconsistent—one player’s ball, for example, might sit Read more…
Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the nine-hole course in South Pittsburg, Tenn., beloved by a devoted group of golf adventurists, announced that it will be closing for three months at the end of May to repair turf damage suffered over the winter. A stretch of severe weather destroyed grass on the course’s fairways and greens. The Read more…
Since TPC Craig Ranch was added to the PGA Tour schedule in 2021 as the new host of the CJ Cup Byron Nelson (previously the AT&T Byron Nelson), it’s been a hitters’ ballpark. In the three tournaments played here, the field is averaging a score of 69.23, one of the lowest aggregate scores on the Read more…
Augusta National’s 18th hole rises about 70 feet from the base of the fairway to the green. The elevation is one of the hole’s defenses as drives don’t roll much and uphill second shots are blind and must cover the front bunker. Uphill shots don’t bother professionals, but they can cause imprecision, and slight imprecisions Read more…
The par-4 11th was named “Dogwood” for the 155 white dogwood trees that lined the fairway when the course opened in 1933. Along with holes 10 and 12, the 11th was cut through the pines on the lowest, most forested section of the property to the south. Augusta National’s seventh and 11th are the most Read more…
The seventh hole is called “Pampas” after a grassy bush indigenous to South America, setting it apart from the course’s hole names that are generally tree and shrub-oriented and more associated with Georgia. It’s an apt departure—the seventh has always been the black sheep of Augusta National, a hole that never quite fit in with Read more…
Augusta National’s par-5 13th is routinely considered one of the greatest holes in golf, and who can argue? The tee has been moved back in recent years and the rear of the green and quartet of bunkers have seen upgrades, but the hole is largely as MacKenzie and Jones found and designed it in 1931. Read more…
As much as any course in the world, Augusta National tailors its architecture to the demands presented one week a year. Virtually every decision the club makes, including each physical alteration, is done in response to how 80-some professional players (and a few amateurs) are playing the holes each April, and patrons are moving about Read more…
Pinehurst never stands still for long. The history of the North Carolina resort is one of continual expansion and evolution, and the last 15 years have been especially consequential, culminating with the opening of the newest course, Pinehurst #10, this month. Around 2010, the resort approached Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw about reviving the indigenous Read more…
Coming off the success of his masterpiece design at National Golf Links of America in 1911, a course he created to broadcast to the world the full potential of golf in the United States, C.B. Macdonald turned his attention to another groundbreaking task, The Lido. Located on the south shore of Long Island on a Read more…
When the latest installment of golf’s newest and most popular head-to-head match-play event, Capital One’s The Match, tees off on Monday, it won’t be the first time the game is played on a public-access golf course. It will be the first time it’s held on a course that most viewers might reasonably be able to Read more…
The respect and study of golf course architecture from the 1910s and ‘20s has never been more alive than it currently is. An aspiring architect who can transform that knowledge into a compelling drawing can earn an invitation to Cypress Point Club, ranked third on America’s 100 Greatest Courses, through the latest installment of the Read more…
Lost Rail, a private, stand-alone golf club near Omaha, earned second-place honors in Golf Digest’s 2023 Best New Private Course awards. It’s a remarkable property of uplands and ravines, prairies and clusters of hardwoods. A namesake abandoned railroad line cuts through a deep gully in one corner of the land, forming a dramatic hazard that Read more…
Each year Golf Digest honors the highest scoring new or remodeled courses in four categories: Best New Public Course, Best New Private Course, Best Renovation (courses that undergo conventional improvements like tree removal, new bunkers, altered tees and expanded or relocated greens) and Best Transformation (courses that are fundamentally remodeled with new or rerouted holes). Read more…
The Lido at Sand Valley in central Wisconsin opened in May and is a down-to-the-inch recreation of The Lido that C.B. Macdonald built on Long Island from 1914 to 1917. Heralded as one of the country’s greatest courses, it went extinct in the 1940s when the U.S. government converted the land to a naval base. Read more…
Editor’s Note: Ladera Golf Club was named Best New Private course by Golf Digest for 2023. We will announce the winners of our other categories in the coming days. When building Ladera, their new course in the southern end of the Coachella Valley, Los Angeles-based entertainment executive Irving Azoff and Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice Read more…
Australian Golf Digest
