The best municipal golf courses in America, and how to get on them

Three of the best courses in the United States are owned by taxpayers. Bethpage Black, Torrey Pines South and TPC Harding Park are all municipal facilities in the U.S. Open or PGA Championship rotation, and any golfer can book them. Here is how the great American munis work, and what to expect at the counter.

This is close to unique in world golf. In most countries the courses that host major championships are private clubs where a visitor needs an introduction. In the United States a city or a state park owns several of them, charges residents a modest fee, and takes bookings from anybody.

The three that host majors

Bethpage Black, on Long Island, is the most famous state-park course in the world, complete with the warning sign at the first tee advising that the course is extremely difficult and recommended only for highly skilled golfers. It is not a joke: the course is long, the rough is genuine, and it is a walking course.

Torrey Pines South sits on the cliffs north of San Diego, hosts an annual PGA Tour event and has held a U.S. Open. The setting is the draw and the course is a serious test from the back markers.

TPC Harding Park occupies the southwest corner of San Francisco beside Lake Merced, has hosted a PGA Championship and a Presidents Cup, and is tree-lined, flat and considerably more playable than the other two for an average golfer.

All three are public, all three are in the championship rotation, and all three run a two-tier price structure: county or city residents pay a modest fee, non-residents pay something closer to resort rates. That structure is the key to planning anything.

Published fee schedules change every season, and several of these courses add advance-booking surcharges for non-residents. Read the official fee list on the course or state park site before you budget, rather than a figure from a travel article.

How to actually get on

Each has its own system, and none of them is first-come, first-served on the day.

• Bethpage operates a reservation system through the state park, with separate windows and pricing for New York State residents and non-residents. The Black draws far more demand than the park’s four other courses, and reservations open on a rolling window that regulars know to the minute.
• Torrey Pines uses an advance booking window with a surcharge for non-residents, alongside a resident lottery. The North Course is considerably easier to get onto and is a genuinely good round in its own right.
• Harding Park takes online bookings with resident pricing, and the neighboring Fleming nine is the local’s answer when Harding is full.

The pattern repeats everywhere: the famous course has a less famous sibling on the same property, on the same soil, at a fraction of the price and with tee times available. Bethpage has four other courses. Torrey has the North. Harding has Fleming and Lake Merced beside it.

Two practical tricks that work at all three. Single golfers get on courses that show nothing available, because a starter can slot one person into a threesome. And cancellations rarely make it back onto the online system fast enough, so a phone call on the morning is worth more than refreshing a page.

The munis nobody writes about

Every large American city has two or three municipal courses that are quietly excellent and permanently under-booked on weekday afternoons.

They are also where the game is cheapest, where juniors learn, where the men’s and women’s clubs run a full competition calendar for modest annual dues, and where a beginner is welcome rather than tolerated. A great many of them were designed in the 1920s and 1930s by architects whose private courses now cost several hundred dollars to play.

Finding them takes one search: your city or county parks and recreation department website, which lists its courses, its resident card, and its booking system, and which is almost never indexed under golf. That page carries information that appears nowhere else, including the twilight rates that make municipal golf the best value in the country.

The resident card, which is the real bargain

Several city and county systems sell an annual resident card that cuts green fees sharply across every course they own, and for anybody who plays public golf more than a handful of times a year it is usually the best value available anywhere in the market.

Do the arithmetic honestly: the number of rounds you actually played last year, times the saving per round, against the card price. In most systems the card pays for itself somewhere between six and twelve rounds.

Some systems also sell an annual pass with unlimited or heavily discounted play, which is effectively a membership without a club, and which almost nobody outside the regulars knows exists.

What to check before you book

Resident versus non-resident pricing, and whether a resident card is worth buying if you will play more than a few times.

The advance booking window, including the exact hour it opens, and any surcharge attached to booking early as a non-resident.

Whether carts are mandatory, which changes the price significantly and is more common than golfers expect at busy municipal facilities.

And the walking policy, because several of the best munis are genuinely walkable, are better rounds on foot, and are cheaper that way.

The men’s and women’s club, which is the real membership

The part of municipal golf that visitors never see is the club inside the club.

Most American municipal courses host a men’s club, a women’s club or both: an association of regular players, open to anybody who pays modest annual dues, that runs a full competition calendar, maintains handicaps through GHIN, holds a club championship, and fields teams against other municipal clubs.

For a public golfer, that is the whole of what a private membership offers apart from the course itself, at a fraction of one month’s dues. It also solves the two problems public golfers complain about most: never having anybody to play with, and never playing anything that counts.

Ask in the pro shop, because these organizations are almost never on the course’s website and are frequently advertised on a single sheet of paper by the door.

Planning a trip around them

One championship muni per trip, not three.

Bethpage Black stretches past 7,400 yards from the tips, is a walking course, and punishes tired golfers without mercy. Play it on the first full day rather than the last, and pair it with the park’s other courses or with a shorter local track rather than with another marathon.

The same logic applies in San Diego and San Francisco: the North Course at Torrey and the Fleming nine at Harding are not filler, they are the rest of a sensible itinerary.

And play the right tees. These courses are set up for championships from the back, and the forward sets exist because the people who run them know what a visitor should be playing.

Why American municipal golf exists at all

The reason the United States has publicly owned courses of championship quality is historical, and worth a paragraph because it explains what you will find.

Cities built golf courses in the 1920s and 1930s, and again through New Deal public works programmes, on the same reasoning that built swimming pools and tennis courts: recreation as a public amenity. A great many of those courses were designed by the significant architects of the era, working for a municipal budget rather than for a private membership.

The consequence is that a city course can be a genuinely important piece of golf architecture, maintained on a public budget and priced for residents. It also explains the condition variance: a muni’s turf budget is a line in a parks department’s accounts, and it competes with everything else the department does.

The past two decades have added a second layer. Several cities have restored their best courses with private fundraising or public-private partnerships, in some cases explicitly to bring championships and their revenue back to a public facility. Bethpage, Torrey Pines and Harding Park are all versions of that story.

What a muni is and is not

Set expectations correctly and municipal golf is the best value in the country. Set them like a resort and you will be disappointed for the wrong reasons.

What you get: interesting golf, frequently on excellent land, at a price that makes playing weekly possible. A clientele that includes everybody, which is the point. Starters and professionals who have seen every standard of player and mind none of them.

What you do not get: resort conditioning every week of the year, a large practice complex at every facility, or a fast round on a Saturday morning. Municipal tee sheets are full because the pricing works, and full sheets mean five-hour rounds at peak times.

The answer to that last point is the same everywhere: play early, play late, play midweek, or play nine. A twilight nine at a city course is the cheapest good golf in America and the emptiest the property will be all day.

Where to book

• Bethpage State Park: tee times and the current fee schedule for all five courses.
• Torrey Pines and TPC Harding Park: book through their official course websites, where the resident and non-resident rates are published.
• Your city or county parks and recreation department, for the municipal courses within twenty minutes of your house that nobody ranks.
• GolfNow and TeeOff for seeing what is available across a metropolitan area, though the course’s own site is the reliable source for rates.

Green fees at these courses change by season, by day and by residency. Confirm the figure at the source when you book. Panxis Golf has no commercial relationship with any course, park system or booking platform mentioned here.

Where this shows up on a course

Three courses from our directory worth the detour.

• Oakland Hills Country Club — South Course: A Donald Ross design from 1918, toughened by Robert Trent Jones for the 1951 U.S. Open: six U.S. Opens, and the most severely contoured greens Ross ever built.
• Quail Hollow Club: Laid out by George Cobb in 1961 and rebuilt by Tom Fazio from 1997: a par 72 of 7,550 yards that rewards driving, and a closing stretch that has decided tournaments.
• Las Vegas Country Club: Opened in 1967 minutes from the Strip: a watered parkland par 72 of 7,150 yards on Bermuda, with a plane in the pond at the tenth and tour-quality turf.

We have not played these courses; each page says what it is based on.