Major Golf Courses You Can Play

Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Byron Nelson had Hall of Fame careers, but none of them ever played a U.S. Open on a public course.

You can (play the course that is, not the U.S. Open itself). There are nearly 50 golf tournaments on the PGA Tour’s annual schedule — and that doesn’t count their so called “challenge” events (Grand Slam, People vs. Pros, etc.), or the various USGA Amateurs, the European PGA Tour, the Ryder and Presidents Cups, or the entire LPGA and Senior (excuse me, Champions) Tour schedules.

Unlike football or baseball, the golf season never ends. It is simply too much golf, not just for fans but for the world’s best players, especially the world’s best player, Tiger Woods, who skips a lot more PGA Tour events than he plays in.

In fact, Tiger has made it clear that there are only four events a year that really matter to him, the majors. You already know them, but to refresh your memory, they are the U.S. Open, Masters, PGA Championship, and the Open Championship, or what we Yanks call the British Open.

The four majors are by far the top golf events of the year, the ones you are most likely to watch. They are also the ones avid golfers want to re-create by playing in the footsteps of the pros. Unfortunately, this is a lot harder than it sounds.

Let’s put aside the British Open for another blog. It is by far the most accessible, since every course that has ever held the Open Championship is available for some degree of public play — but you have to go to the British Isles to do it.

The choices in this country are much slimmer. One major, the Masters, is always held at a course the public cannot play, so forget that one. The other two have a horrible track record of choosing public venues. It took the USGA 77 years to hold the Open at a public course for the first time, and well over a century before it put the tournament on a municipal course in 2002 (Bethpage Black). It’s no surprise this event instantly became known as the “People’s Open.” Previous U.S. Opens could collectively be called the “Stuffy Private Snob” Opens.

The PGA Championship has not done much better. In 2004, when it was held at a public facility, Wisconsin’s Whistling Straits, it was the first time in nearly 30 years.

Good news for all: The situation has improved dramatically in the last few years and will get even better in the next few. Several new public venues have been or are about to be added to the game’s history, and for the first time, there is a decent choice of public major venues you can play at various price points all across the country.

Since it debuted in 1895, the U.S. Open has only been played on four public courses, and three of those were new additions in the past decade, with a fifth, Washington’s Chambers Bay, coming in 2015. Next year the PGA Championship returns to Whistling Straits, and in 2012 to another new public venue, the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, South Carolina.

The great thing about golf is that you can sometimes actually play where the pros play, unlike batting at Wrigley Field or shooting foul shots in Madison Square Garden. You can tee it up at Torrey Pines, Pinehurst Number Two, or Pebble Beach Golf Links and join a who’s who of golf greats, including Tiger Woods, Sam Snead, and Jack Nicklaus (the first public course Open winner in history).

By 2015, there will be an even dozen major venues you can play. Of course, by 2015 majors will have been held in the U.S. nearly 300 times, and the vast majority of these venues still require a member’s invitation. But of the dozen publics, all but two are worth playing, and this list includes some of the most historic and highly rated golf courses on earth, many of them much better than most private major venues. To add to the golf lore and cachet, three of them are also past venues for the Ryder Cup, golf’s answer to the Olympics.