Courses

A golf trip with your buddies anytime is a beautiful thing. But a summertime trip, well, that’s next level. The days are long and dependably warm, so you can play 36 holes—or even more if you’ve got the stamina. The golf season has been underway awhile, so you’ve had a chance to groove your swing

If you’re looking for information on some of the top golf destinations in the world to help plan your next golf trip, we’ve got you covered. Below is a ranking of the Best Summertime Buddies Destinations in the United States and overseas, as selected by Golf Digest’s Course Ranking panelists and members of our Places

The world is heating up. That is not a reference to climate change but rather to global golf development. While a chill remains on new construction in the United States, the golf market has been boiling in many far-away regions. As has been the case throughout his career on and off the golf course, Greg

The rarest and perhaps most pitiful category of golfer (some would describe it as insufferable) is the golf course architecture fanatic. No one has ever been able to explain why a small number of irretrievably corrupted souls happen to gravitate toward golf courses and architecture above all other parts of the game, but all I

The phrase “risk-reward” is thrown around rather haphazardly as it relates to course architecture. Strategically, though, there is no denying the greatness when risk-reward elements are incorporated successfully into a great par 4. As the great architect George C. Thomas wrote in his Anatomy of a Golf Course: “The great courses entice the golfer to

This is the time of year when attention turns to two of the oldest courses on the PGA Tour. Pebble Beach Golf Links and Riviera Country Club opened in 1919 and 1927, respectively, and have combined to host 129 tour events (currently the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Genesis Open), plus 10 men’s majors.

Cypress Point, one of golf’s great cathedrals, doubles as one of golf’s most exclusive enclaves. Thanks to three-plus days of capturing drone footage around the majestic Monterey Peninsula layout, Golf Digest presents everyday golfers with a chance at a complete tour of Cypress Point Club, complete with narration from Jim Nantz, in the latest installment

Often described as the game’s greatest meeting of land and sea, a stroll around Pebble Beach Golf Links is matched by few other courses in the world. The lore of the venerable links, which turned 100 last year as it hosted the U.S. Open for a sixth time, adds to what makes this storied setting

Inside the Del Monte Forest you will find seven splendid golf courses, each of them special and several ranking among the best layouts in the world. Particularly outstanding—and often overlooked—is the sum quality of the par 3s on these courses. As a resident of Pebble Beach and frequent visitor to all the courses here, I’ve

It’s fair to say that if Mrs. Ethicist has heard a bad story about your private club in a non-adjacent state by listening to Howard Stern, you’re doing the whole managing-of-your-professional-reputation thing wrong. Where to begin? Like many bad dates, it started with dinner. Maryana Beyder and her husband, Igor, were just another couple of

I’m asked periodically what career path I would have pursued had my broadcasting gig not panned out. It’s a hard question, because I’ve been working in television since I was a 20-year-old junior at the University of Houston. But I do know that my “other” dream job as a kid growing up in Colts Neck,

Back in the 1960s, an Ohio kid checked in on the construction of what would become the highest-ranked course in the state. The design was The Golf Club, and the kid was Jack Nicklaus—a curious observer to the work being done by Pete Dye. Nicklaus, who by 1966 was a career Grand Slam winner, would

LA JOLLA, Calif. – In 1968, during the heyday of celebrity golf pro-ams, singer Andy Williams lent his cardiganed imprimatur to the San Diego Open, adding a sheen of gold and platinum to the 17-year-old tournament. The branding accompanied the move to Torrey Pines, a youthful but decidedly more scruffy-than-golden public facility located atop the

To accompany our biennial World 100 Greatest Courses list, Golf Digest also publishes a ranking of the best golf courses in every country. Yes, every country where there is golf. To do so, we surveyed our 1,700+ Golf Digest panelists from North America, who are as well-traveled a bunch as you’ll find in the industry,

It’s tempting to describe Golf Digest’s fourth biennial ranking of the World 100 Greatest Golf Courses as a contest between advanced age and youth, legends versus new kids, Old Guard versus Upstarts. I’m speaking not of the architects responsible for the courses, but of the courses themselves. Twenty-three of the 100 Greatest courses outside the

“the man who reinvented golf course design,” as Golf Digest’s Ron Whitten described the master architect, has died at age 94. Dye’s greatest gifts are the golf courses he built for golfers around the world to enjoy, which will endure lifetimes. To honor Mr. Dye’s legacy, we present the 10 highest-ranked golf courses he (and

Sometimes the best of intentions results in unintended consequences. That seems to be true in the case of the 2019 Environmental Leaders in Golf Awards, the annual celebration of golf sustainability co-sponsored by the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America and Golf Digest. From its introduction in 1993 until 2017, the Environmental Leaders in Golf

Scroll down for Golf Digest’s latest ranking of the 30 best courses in Canada, determined by Golf Digest’s 100 Greatest panelists, which consists of about 1,700 well-traveled amateur golfers across the United States and Canada. Golf Digest’s panelists score courses on the following criteria: Shot Options, Challenge, Layout Variety, Distinctiveness, Aesthetics, Conditioning and Character. (Golf

It’s not known what Bing Crosby is saying in this 1958 photograph, taken during the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am by a Golf Digest founding editor, though Bing might be recalling the ace he made a decade earlier on this, the renowned par-3 16th hole at Cypress Point Club. As Golf Digest celebrates its 70th year

Joining a club has never been a terribly transparent, straightforward and unemotional process. Mix in multi-million-dollar real-estate deals, and what could possibly go wrong? To that, a California couple says, Hold my beer. Michael and Jenny DuBasso were contemplating buying a $2 million La Quinta retirement home within Tradition Golf Club’s gated community where Arnold

The Plantation Course at Kapalua on the Hawaiian Island of Maui will be a far different golf course when it hosts the PGA Tour’s Sentry Tournament of Champions this week. Not that most people will notice. “Unless you’re a Kapalua nerd, you won’t notice much change on a TV screen” says Bill Coore, who laid

The decade starting in 2010 presented some real challenges to course designers. With the economy struggling, new golf courses were no longer being built, which meant even golf’s most well-known architects saw the number of projects sharply declining. Despite those initial lack of opportunities came a level of ingenuity in designing courses, giving us a

Here’s why I don’t gamble. Last winter, after I compiled the list of nominees for Golf Digest’s 2019 Best New Courses survey, I privately handicapped the chances of each course, just for my amusement. I gave long odds to Gil Hanse’s entry in the private category, Ohoopee Match Club, an exclusive course in rural Georgia

So, what goes into determining Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s Best New Golf Courses? In 2019, over 1,600 Golf Digest panelists across the U.S. and Canada played and evaluated Best New candidate courses, scoring each in eight evaluation categories: Shot Options, Layout Variety, Challenge, Distinctiveness, Aesthetics, Conditioning, Character and Fun. The average scores of five

Backyard football is the unofficial sport of Thanksgiving, but pick-up pigskin works better in theory than practice. Half the crew is out of shape or hungover, there’s always one guy delivering cheap shots to atone for unresolved childhood drama, and the quarterbacks are so bad they make Mitchell Trubisky look competent. Fun times! Which is

Pinehurst has been very good to Gil Hanse. The golf-course architect and his team just completed a significant renovation of Pinehurst No. 4, redoing the layout in time for the USGA to host the U.S. Amateur on both the storied No. 2 and No. 4 courses this summer. Hanse also built Pinehurst’s nine-hole short course,

Ever since animals first dug into the sides of sandhills in search of shelter from chilly winds, golf links have had deep, dark, foreboding bunkers. Naturally, golf architects soon began imitating nature, and the results are classic hazards like the Road Hole Bunker at St. Andrews in Scotland. Today, it’s a rare golf course that

LAS VEGAS — The slender man turned to the mountains and cursed loudly as his 15-footer stopped just short of its destination. It was not the curse words that were unnerving; profanity is the parlance of our sport. It was the word cursed that resonated, punctuated by fierce mannerisms and a gaze into the distance.

One of golf’s most mysterious sites is almost ready for its grand debut. Or for some, a re-introduction. Sheep Ranch is set to become the fifth 18-hole course at highly popular Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, as it will open its Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw course in June 2020, the resort announced Tuesday. And to

In 2015, when Pete Dye started work on Links at Perry Cabin, he had no idea that soon after his approval of the contours of its last green, he’d be forced into involuntary retirement by the cruelest aspect of the aging process, the dissipation of one’s memory. His fans should know that the 93-year-old Hall