# Griffin Gate Golf Club vs. Lakeside Golf Course: The Lexington Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/griffin-gate-golf-club-vs-lakeside-golf-course/

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Course Comparisons / Kentucky


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

Lexington's golf choice comes with a gate, literally. Griffin Gate is a Rees Jones resort course where play is limited to guests of the Marriott resort it belongs to. Lakeside is the city's municipal course by Jacobson Park, open to everyone, with the longest par 5 in Kentucky waiting somewhere in its 185 acres. One requires a hotel booking. The other requires a tee time and a few dollars. Both appear in [our Lexington ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-lexington-ky/) and [the full Kentucky ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-kentucky/), and a visiting golfer with one free day in horse country will weigh exactly these two.

## Griffin Gate: resort polish, senior tour bones

Rees Jones designed Griffin Gate, which opened in 1981 at the Griffin Gate resort off Newtown Pike, bluegrass parkland in the classic Lexington mold. The course hosted the Senior PGA Tour's Bank One Classic in its earlier decades, per the resort, so the layout has professional scar tissue under the polish. It plays par 72 at 6,784 yards and was voted one of Golf Digest's top 75 resort courses in the United States, per PGA.com. Jones has returned to oversee a major bunker renovation, alongside a $40 million renovation of the resort itself, which means the current version is fresher than its 1981 birthday suggests.

The catch is in the access line. Per PGA.com, play is limited to guests of the Marriott Lexington Griffin Gate Golf Resort and Spa. That is a defensible model for a resort and a frustrating one for a local: Lexington golfers drive past one of their city's best courses knowing it is not for them. For the traveler already booking the hotel, though, the arrangement flatters the round: resort conditioning, a Jones design maintained with senior tour history in mind, and a tee sheet that never carries municipal traffic.

## Lakeside: the city's course, with a monster par 5

Lakeside opened in July 1970 per the City of Lexington, spread across about 185 acres adjacent to Jacobson Park and Jacobson Lake. The city lists it at 18 holes, par 72 and 7,067 yards, which makes a point muni skeptics miss: Lakeside is longer than Griffin Gate by nearly 300 yards. And it holds a genuine claim to fame, the longest par-5 hole in Kentucky at more than 600 yards per the city. A municipal course with a 600-yard par 5 is a gift to local golf arguments. Every Lexington player has a story about that hole, most of them involving a third shot from somewhere humbling.

Concede Lakeside's limits: municipal conditioning runs a step behind a renovated resort, and the design asks fewer sophisticated questions than Jones asks at Griffin Gate. Concede Griffin Gate's the other way: the best-conditioned round in town is the one most townspeople cannot book, and a resort renovation cycle means your experience depends on the hotel's capital calendar, not your own.

## The day, priced two ways

The Griffin Gate day includes the resort whether you want it or not: the room, the grounds, the sense that golf is the amenity anchoring a hotel stay. That is either a perk or a surcharge depending on why you came to Lexington. The Lakeside day is Jacobson Park: families at the lake, a city course doing city work, your round folded into a public landscape that belongs to everyone in Fayette County. Neither course apologizes for its model, and both models are legitimate. But note which one a Lexington teenager with a summer job can play. A city's golf culture is built at the course its kids can reach, and in Lexington that course is Lakeside, 600-yard par 5 and all.

## The verdict

For the visiting golfer already staying at the resort, Griffin Gate is the round: Jones's bunkering, freshly renovated, on bluegrass ground with a senior tour past. For everyone else, and especially for the golfer who lives within driving distance and plays weekly, Lakeside is the honest Lexington choice, a full-length city course with the state's longest par 5 and a park setting that asks nothing of your wallet's dignity. Play Griffin Gate when the room key makes it easy. Keep your regular game at Lakeside, and take your best drive at that 600-yarder. It is waiting.

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