# The Atlanta Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/atlanta-ga-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / Georgia


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Atlanta golf starts with a ghost. Bobby Jones grew up playing East Lake, and the city has been measuring its golf against that one fact ever since. The modern version of the story is stranger and better: the course where Jones learned the game now hosts the Tour Championship every year, in a neighborhood that golf money helped rebuild. Arrive in Atlanta as a golfer and you are not short of famous names. You are short of access, because the top of this town's golf is private almost to a man, and understanding that early will save you a week of hopeful emails.

## Where the golf concentrates

East Lake Golf Club is the anchor. Golf there dates to 1908, when Tom Bendelow laid out the first course, Donald Ross reworked it in 1913, and Rees Jones restored and rebuilt it in 1994 for the modern era. It has been the permanent home of the PGA Tour's Tour Championship since 2004, and it hosted the 1963 Ryder Cup and the 2001 U.S. Amateur long before that. The revival under Tom Cousins funded the turnaround of the surrounding East Lake neighborhood, which makes East Lake the rare famous course whose second act is a civic story as much as a golf one. Private, yes. But it is the first name in any honest account of Atlanta golf, and our [Atlanta town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-atlanta-ga/) puts it there too.

Peachtree Golf Club is the other Jones course, and almost nobody sees it. Robert Trent Jones Sr. designed it with Bobby Jones, it opened in 1947 with club play from 1948, and at over 7,200 yards it was among the longest courses in America at the time. The enormous punchbowl green at the 10th is the detail insiders trade. Peachtree is the only Jones and Jones collaboration besides Augusta National's lineage in Georgia lore, it is consistently ranked among America's best private courses, and it is invitation only in the strictest sense. If East Lake is Atlanta's public face of greatness, Peachtree is the closed door behind it.

The working private tier below those two is where Atlanta members actually live. Capital City Club's Brookhaven course, a Tom Fazio design opened in 1991, is the championship layout of a club founded in 1883 with a downtown clubhouse, set on rolling Brookhaven terrain with lakes, and a host of local USGA and Georgia PGA events. Ansley Golf Club, founded in 1912 in Ansley Park, runs an unusual two facility model: a nine hole Midtown original plus the Settindown Creek course in Roswell, a Bob Cupp design from 1990 that has hosted Nike Tour and U.S. Women's Amateur qualifying, and serves as the club's championship venue. Druid Hills Golf Club rounds out the traditional in-town private roster. A visiting golfer with one member connection in Atlanta will most likely land at Capital City or Ansley, and either round is a fair picture of the town's golf: established, private, and played on ground these clubs have held for a century.

## The order to play them, and the mistake to avoid

If the invitations somehow line up, play East Lake last. Its Tour Championship setup and Jones history make it the crescendo, and playing it first will quietly ruin the rest of the week. Start at Capital City Brookhaven or Ansley for the member's Atlanta, take Peachtree whenever the rarest invitation in Georgia golf appears, and finish where Jones grew up. All of these clubs sit in the highest or high estimate tiers for cost of belonging, and the clubs do not publish figures, so treat any number attached to them as an estimate.

The one mistake visitors make is assuming Atlanta's fame means Atlanta is bookable. It is not, at the top. The town's great courses are private, its king is a tour venue with a membership roll, and its second course is one of the hardest invitations in the South. Plan the trip around the connection you actually have, not the list you read on the plane, and check [the Georgia state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-georgia/) for where these clubs sit against the rest of the state. Do that, and Atlanta rewards you the way it rewards its own: quietly, behind a gate, on ground Bobby Jones would still recognize.

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