# The Akron Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/akron-oh-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / Ohio


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tiger Woods won eight times at Firestone. Read that the way it deserves to be read. Not eight times across a career of cherry picked venues, but eight wins at one course in Akron, Ohio, a course that hosted three PGA Championships and decades of World Golf Championships events after that. Firestone South did not collect that record by being convenient. It collected it because the best fields in golf kept arriving in Akron, year after year, and the course kept producing a champion nobody argued with. That is what Akron golf is. One great club, three courses, and a tournament history most American cities cannot match.

## Where the golf concentrates

Everything in this guide starts at Firestone Country Club, and honesty requires saying so up front. Akron's golf reputation is Firestone's reputation. The club has three courses: the South Course, the North Course, and the Fazio Course. The South is the famous one, the long parkland championship test that hosted the PGAs and the WGCs. Its 16th hole, a par 5 of well over 600 yards known as the Monster, is one of the most famous holes in American tournament golf, a hole that has been swallowing final round ambitions since before most of today's tour players were born.

The North and the Fazio play the supporting roles at the club, and a Firestone visit is built as a multi course stay rather than a single round. That structure is the guide. Akron is not a town where you assemble five public tee times across a long weekend. It is a town where one club holds the whole story, which is why Firestone dominates [the best golf courses in Akron](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-akron-oh/) and Akron's place in [the 5 best golf courses in Ohio](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-ohio/).

## The order to play them

Play the South first, while your swing and your nerve are fresh. It is the championship course, the reason you came, and a long par 70 style test of the kind that punishes a tired golfer without mercy. Woods winning there eight times tells you what the course rewards: driving that is both long and straight, patience across four hours of parkland questions, and respect for the Monster late in the round when the tournament has historically been decided.

Play the North second. After the South's examination, the North is the round where a Firestone trip breathes, the club course to the South's championship course, and the right second day for a group that wants golf in the same setting without the same severity. Play the Fazio Course third, to complete the set. Three courses, one club, one trip: that is the honest shape of golf in Akron, and golfers who accept it have a better time than golfers who arrive expecting a public golf town.

## Access, timing, and the one mistake

The access reality is plain. Firestone is a private club. The South Course is not a tee time a visitor books online, and any guide that implied otherwise would be wasting your time. A Firestone round runs through membership, a member host, or the club's own channels, and that gate is part of why the course has stayed what it is. Northeast Ohio timing follows the northern calendar, late spring through fall, with the tournament season's high summer showing the South in its championship dress.

The one mistake visitors make is treating Akron as a detour, a single round squeezed into a Cleveland or Columbus trip. Firestone deserves the trip built around it. Three courses, a famous 16th, and a winners list that starts with Woods and runs backward through decades of majors golf: give it two days, play the South when you are fresh, and walk the Monster knowing exactly whose footsteps the hole has ended.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.