There's a particular kind of golf course that costs almost nothing and is better than most of what you'll pay four hundred dollars for. They're municipal, they're often shabby around the edges, and a lot of them were designed by people whose names appear on courses you'll never be allowed to play.
Learning to spot them is the single best value skill in golf.
Why they exist
In the twenties and thirties, cities built golf courses the way they built libraries — as public goods, on good land, often hiring the best architects available. Donald Ross, A.W. Tillinghast, Perry Maxwell and William Langford all have municipal work in their portfolios.
Then the money dried up. Maintenance budgets shrank, trees grew in where they shouldn't, bunkers filled, and the routing stayed exactly where it was.
The architecture doesn't leave when the budget does. The green complexes are still the green complexes. The land still moves the way the architect saw it moving. You're just seeing it with a haircut it didn't ask for.
How to spot one
- Check the architect. Thirty seconds online. If a course from the twenties or thirties has a name attached, go.
- Look at the green complexes, not the grass. Are the greens pushed up, sloped, defended by their own contours? That's architecture. Green speed is just money.
- Look for land that moves. Cities built on the ground they had, which was often riverfront, ravines or hillside nobody could build houses on.
- Ignore the clubhouse entirely. The correlation between clubhouse quality and course quality is close to zero, and at munis it's arguably negative.
- Ask a starter what the best hole is. If he answers instantly and with feeling, you're in the right place.
What to forgive, and what not to
Forgive: patchy fairways, slow greens, worn tee boxes, a five-hour round on a Saturday, carts with no GPS, a hot dog that isn't good.
Don't forgive: greens with no contour left because they've been top-dressed flat for forty years, or a routing hacked apart to fit a road through. Those are the two things that actually kill an old course, and neither can be fixed by a better budget.
How to build the trip
The muni road trip is a different animal from a resort trip and better for it. Two cars, one cooler, three or four courses in a loop, motels rather than resorts, and diners rather than restaurants.
Look for clusters. Cities that built several courses in the same era usually still have them — you can often find three genuinely good old municipal courses within forty minutes of each other in a mid-sized American city nobody thinks of as a golf destination.
Budget forty to eighty dollars a round. Which means the whole week costs less than one round somewhere famous, and you'll have seen more actual golf architecture.
The practical bit
- Look for
- Courses built 1920–1940 with a named architect
- Judge on
- Green complexes and routing. Never conditioning
- Play
- Weekday mornings. Weekends are five hours
- Budget
- $40–$80 a round, most places
- Book
- Often you can just turn up midweek. That's part of the appeal
- Walk it
- Most were built to be walked, and they're better on foot
Why this is the best golf trip nobody takes
You will play better architecture per dollar on a municipal road trip than on any other trip in golf. You'll also play with retired guys who've had the same 8am Tuesday time for nineteen years and will tell you exactly where to miss on every hole.
Nobody's going to be impressed when you tell them where you went. That's rather the point.