The top public-access offerings in this stacked golf state go on for miles, especially in the Phoenix-Scottsdale region.
Arizona is a gifted golf state, with desert courses of all kinds to suit any budget or taste. Especially in the region of Phoenix and Scottsdale, there are miles and miles of fairways to welcome residents, visitors and seasonal snowbirds alike.
Tops among the public-access offerings is We-Ko-Pa’s Saguaro Course, designed by famed architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. One of two courses at the facility operated by a casino next door, the Saguaro Course ranks No. 1 in Arizona on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for each state.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with the list of top public-access courses among the most popular. All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
The Robert Trent Jones Trail takes up most of the spots for best public-access golf courses in Alabama, but the No. 1 spot is elsewhere.
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail grabs much of the spotlight for best courses in Alabama, and rightfully so. The Trail operates 26 courses at 11 sites across the state, and eight of the top 10 public-access courses in the Yellowhammer State are on the Trail.
FarmLinks at Pursell Farms in Sylacauga grabs the top spot on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for Alabama, and alongside Kiva Dunes is one of only two non-Trail courses on the list.
Constructed as a living laboratory of sorts by Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry in 2002, with various types of grasses in use around the property, FarmLinks features one of the prettiest holes in the state. The 210-yard, par-3 fifth plunges 172 feet off the side of a small mountain to a picturesque green, providing views for miles. Most of the other holes feature wide fairways with sometimes hilly terrain before descending into gently rolling landscapes.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with the list of top public-access courses among the most popular. All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
Work includes new TifEagle putting surfaces, refreshed bunkers and tree removal.
Pinehurst No. 8, designed by Tom Fazio and opened in 1996, has undergone extensive agronomic and infrastructure enhancements this summer and will reopen Friday, Sept. 2.
The course, built to commemorate the resort’s centennial anniversary, ranks as the No. 7 public-access layout in a stacked state, as judged by Golfweek’s Best raters. The resort’s famed Pinehurst No. 2 course is the top-ranked public-access layout in North Carolina, the No. 4 course ranks second in the state, and the No. 9 and No. 7 courses also make the top 15 in the state.
The work to No. 8 included new TifEagle greens, restored bunkers with fresh sand, improved drainage throughout the course and the removal of invasive trees that blocked sunlight and views. The fairways also were “fraise” mowed, a disruptive process that removes years of thatch and undesired organic matter to provide faster, firmer playing surfaces.
“No. 8 now appears crisper to the eye and plays firmer and faster, the way Tom Fazio originally intended it,” Pinehurst Resort director of agronomy Bob Farren, who oversaw the work, said in a media release announcing the news. “Fazio, (resort owner) Bob Dedman and (resort president) Tom Pashley all agreed that No. 8 should retain its original, commemorative design. As such, these changes are aesthetic and agronomic with no alterations to the course’s architecture.”
There’s plenty more work being done at the resort including the renovation of the Carolina Hotel, on which Phase 1 of work is being completed. Other work at the hotel includes upgrades to the Ryder Cup Terrace that wraps around much of the building, which now will include areas with fire pits and soft seating near the Ryder Cup Lounge.
Rob Collins and design partner Tad King break the glass ceiling with Landmand Golf Club in Nebraska.
Big and bold – good words to live by. Interesting, different, unlikely. All attributes ascribed to artists, authors, chefs, actors … really anyone who can grab attention and hold it.
Even golf course architects.
Rob Collins initially grabbed attention for his big and bold design at Sweetens Cove Golf Club which opened in 2015 in remote Tennessee. A nine-holer built on a flat floodplain amidst the Appalachian Mountains, Sweetens Cove had to grab attention and hold it – a run-of-the-mill design atop the previous course named Sequatchie Valley on the same damp site might have drawn flies, but not many golfers.
Instead, Collins and his design partner, Tad King, moved some 300,000 cubic yards of dirt to erect what has become Tennessee’s No. 1-ranked public-access course in Golfweek’s Best ratings. Big greens, bold slopes – there are those words again, and at Sweetens Cove, those concepts have drawn a loyal following of golfers who will drive to the middle of nowhere to experience something different and entirely interesting.
“I always did believe there was some form of greatness to be achieved out there, and that it could be very popular,” Collins said of Sweetens Cove, the first course built by his and King’s then-new golf architecture firm, King-Collins. “It was so different and so unique and so much fun, the early adopters of the place gave us so much enthusiasm and belief in what we had done. It was like a religious experience for a lot of people.”
Now comes the next step in big and bold for King-Collins, on a completely different landscape and scale – and after waiting longer than either could have imagined after Sweetens Cove’s ascent into the top 100 modern golf courses in the U.S.
The public-access Landmand Golf Club in eastern Nebraska, King-Collins’ first original 18-hole layout, opens for regular play September 3 on what Collins describes as simply crazy terrain for golf. Built atop and around bluffs and dunes near the village of Homer in the Loess Hills – geologic terrain left in the wake of retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age – Landmand presented unique challenges and opportunities in a wide-open and extreme landscape with views for miles. Collins said he and King went all-out in trying to take advantage of everything the site, including its 150 feet of elevation changes, offered.
An all-timer today @LandmandG – it’s impossible to express the amount of gratitude that Tad & I feel toward @wanders1140 & his great family for giving us this opportunity. It was a thrill from start to finish playing shots into features that so many labored over. pic.twitter.com/cujUBk2pQk
“You had to just put the pedal down and go for it,” Collins said of his approach to Landmand. “The first time you see it, the scale is just going to blow your mind. Every time I go out there, I laugh about it. Things that are gigantic in reality just shrink in this landscape.”
On such a vast playing field – and because of the region’s frequent gusty winds – Collins said his team was inspired to install massive fairways, sometimes with one fairway corridor serving two holes. None of the fairways are less than 80 yards wide, several single fairways top out at more than 100 yards wide and the connecting fairways are stretched beyond 150 yards.
“A 60- or 70-yard-wide fairway just doesn’t cut it out there because it shrinks visually in the scale of that landscape,” Collins said. “And so, a 60-yard fairway would look 30 yards wide. You hit a ball out there and walk down into the fairway, you’re like, ‘My God, it’s gigantic, there’s no way I could have missed this fairway.’ You need features that are just that big out there.”
The green for the short par-4 17th as the grass grows in at Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska (Courtesy of Landmand Golf Club)
The greens at Landmand are similarly huge. Average greens at most U.S. courses are between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet – purely for example, Augusta National Golf Club’s greens average just over 6,400 square feet, while those at Pebble Beach Golf Links are tiny at about 3,500 square feet. At Landmand, King-Collins constructed putting surfaces that frequently blow past 20,000 square feet.
As a comparison for King-Collins fans, Collins said he receives frequent comments on the size of the fourth green at Sweetens Cove, an Alps-inspired putting surface stretching some 80 yards front to back. At Landmand, the fourth green from Sweetens would be only the fifth-largest putting surface.
Collins cites the par-3 fifth at Landmand as a great example of a large green fitting a big landscape. The approach from the back tee is some 240 yards across a chasm to a putting surface of more than 25,000 square feet.
“You look at it, and yeah it seems big, but then you get on it and realize it’s huge,” Collins said. “It has to be to fit. Standing on the tee, even a 12,000-square-foot green on top of that ridge would look stupid. It would look like a pimple on the ass of an elephant. It would look like we shied away from the landscape. We had to build features that embraced that boldness.”
It’s all part of the width and size serving strategy. Players shouldn’t just whack away and expect an easy next shot from a wide, forgiving fairway, especially if the wind blows. There’s skill to discerning the best route to any hole, Collins said, and golfers better think before they swing.
“Every shot on every golf course we ever do, we want to have a meaning behind it,” he said. “We don’t want any hole to take a shot off. We always want the golfer engaged. That may mean hazard placement, or in a lot of cases at a place like Landmand, it’s a big contour. … Each hole at Landmand was built to ask varying versions of some type of questions, and a lot of that is through contour.”
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Ireland and Northern Ireland? The green waves of Emerald Isle? An ice-cold pint of Guinness? Rory McIlroy?
One thing that should not go overlooked is the beauty of both Irish and Northern Irish golf.
This ranking comes directly from the hundreds of Golfweek’s Best Raters for 2021 who continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course on a points basis of 1-10. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final rating for each course. Only a handful of courses in the world achieve a rating above 9, and any course rated 7 or above presents a can’t-miss opportunity.
For more of Golfweek’s Best course lists, check out the most recent selection of course rankings:
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Check out the photos of the recently upgraded bonus hole beneath staggering cliffs, which now features a new waterfall and bar.
The most popular golf hole at Big Cedar Lodge isn’t even among the Missouri resort’s three traditional 18-hole courses or even its two par-3 courses. That distinction goes the 19th hole, a 112-yard bonus hole designed by Bass Pro Shops and Big Cedar founder Johnny Morris at the resort’s newest layout, Payne’s Valley.
Built into a pond beneath a stunning cliff wall featuring waterfalls, the bonus hole until recently had been aced 12 times since its introduction in September of 2020, when the Tiger Woods-designed Payne’s Valley opened with a name in tribute to Ozarks native Payne Stewart. But on August 18, that total was raised by two more holes-in-one in a matter of minutes.
Billye Hollister of Arlington, Virginia, made the first hole-in-one of the pair, and his group went suitably bonkers after his shot from the back tees found the cup toward the front-middle of the island green. The left-hander’s ball touched down just past the stick before one-hopping backward into the hole.
Just minutes later in a different group, Susan Stevens of Augusta, Georgia, jarred her tee shot from the front tee box, the ball bouncing twice before rolling into the cup as gently as a putt.
It’s an amazing setting for a 19th hole, and the resort has made significant upgrades since the par 3 opened two years ago. A bar was recently built near the tee, and a new waterfall feature was added to the cliff wall atop which sits the clubhouse and cabins. Check out the photos below.
Susan Stevens and Billye Hollister after their holes-in-one at the bonus 19h hole at Payne’s Valley at Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri (Courtesy of Big Cedar Lodge)
Big Cedar is home to three of the top four courses in Missouri, as judged by Golfweek’s Best rating of public-access courses for each state. Ozarks National, designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, ranks No. 1 on that list, followed by the Tom-Fazio designed Buffalo Ridge at No. 2 and Payne’s Valley at No. 4. The resort also boasts the Top of the Rock and Mountain Top par-3 courses among dozens of other attractions that include everything from fishing to go-cart racing for kids.
The PGA Tour star built a second career as a course designer, with many of his layouts ranking high in Golfweek’s Best course rankings.
Tom Weiskopf, who died Saturday at age 79 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, accomplished much more in golf than just his 16 PGA Tour titles, including the 1973 British Open.
Weiskopf was an accomplished course designer with dozens of layouts around the world, many of which place highly in various Golfweek’s Best course rankings. Following is a list of his top 15 courses, as judged by Golfweek’s panel of more than 850 raters.
Our course-ratings panel members continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. Members also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings. The list below includes each course’s average rating.
The various Golfweek’s Best rankings (top 200 modern, top modern international, top private and public courses in each state, et cetera) have different requirements for numbers of ballots necessary to appear on each list. This list of Weiskopf’s courses ignores all those various ballot requirements to simply create one lineup of the designer’s best courses, regardless of number of votes, which could lead to slight variations in this versus other Golfweek’s Best lists.
Check out these A.W. Tillinghast courses open to the public.
With the U.S. Amateur this week at Ridgewood Country Club in New Jersey, fans have their latest in a string of opportunities to see the work of Hall of Fame architect A.W. Tillinghast. After about a century — and with some celebrated restorations — many of these tracks still provide stern championship tests. As with most of Golfweek’s Best top classic courses, they stir something in the soul.
And although most of Tillie’s gems are behind private gates, public golfers need neither highfalutin connections nor deep pockets to experience the old genius’ nuances.
First among options is the cathedral of municipal golf, Bethpage State Park on Long Island. Bethpage has the highest concentration of publicly available Tillinghast holes anywhere. All five courses on the property have at least some Tillie holes. While the major-championship mainstay Black Course garners most of the attention, the state park as a whole offers a comprehensive view of Tillinghast’s ability to design holes for players of all abilities across varying topography.
There are still nine states that are still hoping their day in the sun is still to come.
This week the PGA Tour visits the First State for the time.
Wilmington Country Club will play host, marking the PGA Tour’s first-ever event in the state of Delaware and the 10th different venue to host the BMW Championship since the inception of the FedEx Cup in 2007.
“You’ve got to hit it as far as you can and hit a lot of fairways,” advised BMW defending champion and reigning FedEx Cup champion Patrick Cantlay.
Delaware becomes the 41st state in the union to host a Tour event, but that means there are still nine states that are still hoping their day in the sun is still to come.
Maine is one of the nine remaining states that have never hosted a Tour event. Professional golf has been absent from northeast New England, five states within the Mountain Time Zone and Alaska. Some states barely avoided making the list. Nebraska was spared solely by the 1933 Nebraska Open, Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene hosted the 1992 Merrill Lynch Shootout and Arkansas made headlines with the Arlington Hotel Open from 1955-63.
Some of these states have hosted Nationwide, Champions and LPGA events, but the locals are waiting patiently for Rory, Tiger and Jordan to grace them with their presence.
Here’s a list of some of the golf courses that could potentially host the stars of the PGA Tour someday. (Special thanks to longtime Golfweek reader and journalist Peter Kollmann, who helped with the research.)
Imagine stepping inside a cruise ship, but instead of ocean water, you’re surrounded by the Sonoran Desert.
Imagine stepping inside a cruise ship, but instead of ocean water, you’re surrounded by the Sonoran Desert.
We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort, about 30 miles northeast of central Phoenix on land owned by the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, is where this vision becomes reality as a reimagined one-stop vacation spot.
People who visited We-Ko-Pa before the pandemic will find a different, higher-end experience today, said Gail Manginelli, a spokeswoman for the resort.
“We have everything right here — fine dining, a casino, golf, outdoor activities and a spa,” she said. “And you feel like you’re away from it all, even though you’re close enough. All you see is desert.”
A reinvention and rebranding
The 166,341-square-foot casino resort, an AAA Four Diamond hotel, reinvented and rebranded itself upon the completion of a new, 100 percent smoke-free casino in October 2020. It replaced the original Fort McDowell Casino.
The resort closed in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but reopened in May, not long before its refresh was completed.
Slot machines at the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation’s We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort in Fort McDowell, Arizona. (Photo: Joel Angel Juarez/The Arizona Republic)
The resort is across the street from the We-Ko-Pa Golf Club, which has two award-winning golf courses with desert and mountain views, and close to Fort McDowell Adventures, which hosts outdoor experiences like horseback tours and desert Segway tours.
We-Ko-Pa resort, Fort McDowell Casino are now unified
Before the pandemic, the We-Ko-Pa hotel and Fort McDowell Casino operated as separate entities.
The casino opened in 1984 under the name Ba’Ja Bingo, Manginelli said. It was Arizona’s first casino.
The hotel opened in 2006 as the Radisson Fort McDowell Resort & Casino, then was renamed the We-Ko-Pa Resort & Conference Center in 2014, she said. The hotel has 246 rooms, 25,000 square feet of meeting space, two outdoor pools and a spa.
Unifying the hotel and casino enabled We-Ko-Pa to build “a more cohesive brand” and operate more efficiently, Manginelli said.
An upgraded, smoke-free new casino
Open 24 hours, We-Ko-Pa’s casino boasts more than 900 slot machines, a 400-seat bingo hall, and 16 blackjack tables.
In the last 12 months, the casino introduced new gaming options including new craps and roulette table games and eight sports betting kiosks.
A key difference from the old casino is how the new one opened as a smoke-free venue, said Christi Windle, We-Ko-Pa’s director of sales.
“No one has ever smoked in it,” she said. “With other casinos, even if it’s smoke-free, you can still have lingering smoke (from when smoking was allowed).”
Where to eat at We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort
One of the most prominent additions to We-Ko-Pa since its rebranding is Ember, a fine dining restaurant specializing in steaks and seafood. It has attracted high interest among visitors and received high-profile recognition.
“It really is a freestanding destination,” Windle said. “Some people come just for the restaurant.”
The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation’s We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort in Fort McDowell, Arizona. (Photo: Joel Angel Juarez/The Arizona Republic)
OpenTable recognized Ember in its 2022 Diner’s Choice awards as one of the 10 Arizona restaurants with the best service.
Ember’s wine selection encompasses 22 countries with 800 wines by the bottle and 26 wines by the glass. These include 32 wines that scored a perfect 100 points on Wine Spectator’s world’s best wine lists.
Wine Spectator recently honored Ember for outstanding wine curation. The resort said on July 25 that Ember received the magazine’s 2022 Best of Award of Excellence.
Ember also received this recognition in 2021.
“That we won this award two years in a row – which also happens to be how long Ember has been open – is a testament to our entire staff’s commitment to excellence,” Zac Gallo, We-Ko-Pa’s executive director of food and beverage, said in a statement.
Ember isn’t the only place to eat at We-Ko-Pa. Other restaurants include:
WKP Sports & Entertainment, which serves pub food and craft beer and hosts live music and sports betting.The Market, a quick-serve restaurant with on-the-go options, open 24 hours a day.
The Dining Studio, with two all-you-can-eat restaurants in one: Las Tapas, which serves Mexican food, and Dragon Wok & Noodle, which serves Asian food.
Ahnala, a breakfast and lunch spot specializing in American comfort food.
What’s next for We-Ko-Pa
The rebranding and enhancements to the guest experience – right down to the Native American design elements in the lobby – were intended to reimagine We-Ko-Pa as a must-visit destination.
And there’s still more to come. The poolside cabanas will be upgraded to “super deluxe,” each with its own TV and refrigerator.
The new cabanas were supposed to debut in May, but supply chain disruptions delayed completion, Windle said.
Occupancy at We-Ko-Pa is up
The result of We-Ko-Pa’s work is an occupancy rate that staff said is “well exceeding” pre-pandemic levels.
“Everybody’s just super excited to come out and have an experience,” Windle said.
Business travel is still overcoming pandemic-era challenges nationwide and in the Phoenix area, but We-Ko-Pa’s business from groups is strong going into 2023.
A view of the pool at the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation’s We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort in Fort McDowell, Arizona. (Photo: Joel Angel Juarez/The Arizona Republic)
Staff attributed this in part to upcoming events like the Super Bowl and the WM Phoenix Open.
“(Travelers are) wanting it to be 2019,” Windle said. “They give me three to four dates and we’re all booked.”
