Course Profiles / New York
Fishers Island Club: A Course Profile
You get there by ferry. There is no other way, and Seth Raynor understood what that meant when he laid out Fishers Island in 1926. A course on a private island, with ocean views from nearly every hole, does not need to shout. The water does the talking, and the golf underneath it has to be good enough that nobody spends the round just looking at the view.
Raynor died in early 1926, before the course officially opened. That fact hangs over the place in a way that is hard to shake. This is one of the last things he built, par 72 at 6,616 yards on the card, 6,566 yards with a slope of 134 per Golf Digest, and it reads like a man working with complete confidence in his templates. There are two Redan greens here, and one of them sits on a par 4, which is not where a Redan is supposed to live. It works because Raynor never treated his templates as copies. They were starting points, and at Fishers Island the land kept pulling them somewhere new.
The golf, hole by hole in spirit
Three holes here rank on Golf Digest's list of America's 100 Greatest Holes. That is an absurd hit rate for a course most golfers will never see, and it tells you the quality is not about one signature moment. The ocean is present nearly everywhere, so wind is not an occasional factor. It is the architecture's second designer, changing what a 6,600 yard course asks from one hour to the next. On a calm morning the course can feel almost gentle. By afternoon, with the breeze up, the same tee shots start asking real questions about which side of the fairway you actually wanted.
We score the golf first, then the day, then what access costs you, and Fishers Island wins on the first two counts without argument. The Redans reward the shot that uses the slope instead of fighting it. The short yardage by modern standards is not a weakness either. It keeps the course in the conversation for the member who plays it weekly, not just the guest who plays it once and photographs everything.
Our full state list puts it where it belongs in the 5 best golf courses in New York, among company that includes some of the most famous private clubs in America.
Access, honestly stated
It is private. Not resort private, not semi-private with a phone call and a credit card. Private, on an island, reached by ferry. For nearly every reader, this is a course to study rather than to book, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. That remoteness is also part of why the course has survived so intact. Fewer rounds, fewer committees with new ideas, fewer reasons to stretch it for a championship it will never host.
The concession is obvious, and we will make it plainly. A course this inaccessible asks its reputation to do work that a public golfer cannot check. Rankings, ours included, lean on history and on the testimony of the small number of people who have played it. That is a real limit. There are excellent golfers who would trade one round here for a season somewhere they can actually get to, and their argument is not wrong.
Still, the design case does not depend on mystique. Strip away the ferry and the island and the views, and you still have Raynor's boldest use of his own ideas, including a Redan asked to do par 4 work, on ground that lets the ground game live. Few courses anywhere, private or public, make that case as cleanly as this one does in our New York ranking.
It also sits in Suffolk County, which is an unfair county for golf by any measure, with Southampton and the East End courses a short stretch of water away. Fishers Island holds its place in that company not by size or by tournament history, it has neither the yardage nor the major championship resume of its neighbors, but by the purity of what Raynor left on the ground in his final year.
The last light on an island course hits different because you can see water in two directions at once. Fishers Island does not need that light to be great. It just happens to get it anyway.