Stories from America's Greatest Courses

Essays on architecture, history, travel, and the players who shaped the modern game.

The Journal is where we go beyond the map and the Top 100 ranking to explore why certain courses endure. These pieces sit alongside our ranking methodology and our index of course architects, and they're written for golfers planning a trip as much as for students of design.

We dig into the questions that come up again and again: which of America's greatest courses you can actually play, why so much of the top 25 was built before 1940, and how a single Georgia club shaped the look of American golf. Every essay links directly to the course profiles it discusses, so you can move from idea to itinerary in a click.

Latest essays & guides

What we write about

• Architecture — routing, greens, and the design ideas that separate a great course from a legendary one. Start with What Makes a Top 100 Golf Course?
• History — how the game's defining places came to be, like the Augusta National aesthetic.
• Travel — bucket-list trips you can actually book, including the public and resort top-100 courses.
• Eras — the enduring debate of Golden Age vs. the modern era.