Course Profiles / Kentucky

Griffin Gate Golf Club: A Course Profile

In its early years, Griffin Gate hosted the Senior Tour, back when the senior circuit still played a lot of its golf at resort courses and the fields were full of names that had won majors in their forties and were still dangerous in their fifties. The Bank One Classic, a Senior PGA Tour and later Champions Tour event, came to this Rees Jones course in Lexington, and that history does quiet work for the place. A resort course that held professional fields is a different animal from a resort course that merely rents carts. The pros leave, but the standard stays in the ground.

Griffin Gate opened in 1981 at the Marriott Lexington Griffin Gate Golf Resort and Spa, on the bluegrass parkland off Newtown Pike. Par 72, 6,784 yards. Golf Digest once voted it among the top 75 resort courses in the United States, and it still appears in the magazine's Places to Play listings. Those are respectable credentials. The interesting question is what kind of golf course it is now, four decades on, and who should actually play it.

Rees Jones, resort brief

Rees Jones built his name on two kinds of work: preparing courses for championships, and building tests that could hold a field without embarrassing the paying guests the other 51 weeks of the year. Griffin Gate is the second kind done properly. At 6,784 yards it is not long by modern standards, and it was never meant to be. The defense is positioning, bunkering that punishes the lazy line rather than the short hitter, and greens that ask for the right section. That is a sensible brief for a resort in horse country, where the guest list runs from single figures to couples playing nine holes before dinner.

The bunkering is also where the recent money went. Rees Jones returned to oversee a major bunker renovation, part of a wider $40 million renovation of the resort itself, per PGA.com. Bunkers are the first thing to decay at a resort course and the last thing the brochure mentions. Sand washes out, edges crumble, drainage fails, and within a decade the hazards stop playing like hazards. A resort that brings the original architect back to rebuild them is a resort still taking the golf seriously, and Griffin Gate's renovation is the strongest evidence that the Bank One Classic standard is a living one rather than a plaque.

The access catch

Now the plain problem, because there is one and it is structural. Play at Griffin Gate is limited to guests of the Marriott resort, per PGA.com. This is not a public course you can book on a Saturday whim, and it is not a private club either. It sits in the resort category, which means the tee time comes bundled with a hotel stay whether you want the room or not. In our Lexington ranking, that access model costs it ground against courses a local can simply call and play. In the Kentucky state ranking, the same rule applies: the golf is graded first, but the day and the access count for real points.

For the golfer already staying at the resort, the calculus flips. You are on property, the course hosted senior tour fields, the bunkers are freshly rebuilt under the original architect's eye, and the bluegrass parkland setting does what it has done since 1981. As a piece of a Lexington trip built around horses and bourbon, it is the easiest quality round to arrange in the city precisely because the hotel handles everything.

The concession, fairly stated: at 6,784 yards, strong players will find Griffin Gate short, and the design plays fair rather than fierce. Nobody is coming here to be beaten up, and a golfer who wants a championship examination at full length should look elsewhere in the state. What Griffin Gate offers instead is a well kept, tour tested resort course that knows its job. Forty years in, with its bunkers rebuilt and its architect still answering the phone, it is doing that job better than most.