Course Comparisons / Kentucky
Griffin Gate Golf Club vs. University Club of Kentucky Wildcat Course: The Lexington Choice
Lexington's choice is unusually practical. One course comes with a resort attached, and you can only play it if you are sleeping there. The other is a semi-private university club course where the Kentucky Wildcats themselves play. A visiting golfer and a local golfer will read this comparison and reach opposite conclusions, and both will be right, which is what makes it worth writing properly.
Griffin Gate: Rees Jones and the resort key
Griffin Gate is a Rees Jones design from 1981 at the Marriott Lexington Griffin Gate Golf Resort and Spa, bluegrass parkland by Newtown Pike, playing par 72 at 6,784 yards. It hosted Senior Tour events in its early years, including the Senior PGA Tour and Champions Tour Bank One Classic per Marriott, and it was voted one of Golf Digest's top 75 resort courses in the United States per PGA.com. Rees Jones returned to oversee a major bunker renovation, alongside a $40 million resort renovation per PGA.com, so the course a guest plays now is a refreshed version of the 1981 original rather than a museum piece.
The catch is in the access line, and it is not buried. Play is limited to guests of the resort per PGA.com. There is no public tee time, no semi-private rate, no local membership route in the record. You book a room, you play the golf. For a traveler already staying in Lexington, that is simple. For a local, it can make one of the city's best known courses effectively invisible, a place driven past on Newtown Pike and never played.
The Wildcat: Arthur Hills, semi-private, and open
The Wildcat Course at the University Club of Kentucky is an Arthur Hills design from 1992, semi-private, playing par 71 at 6,680 yards, with bentgrass greens and multiple tee boxes. The club sits on 300 acres with a dozen lakes and ponds across its 36 holes, the Wildcat alongside the Big Blue Course, and the Wildcat is the more parkland of the two, rolling through trees along creeks and ponds per club releases. The University Club is the official home of the University of Kentucky men's and women's golf teams per club releases, which gives a semi-private round here a small charge that resort golf rarely has: the practice ground and the scoreboard belong to a real college program.
On yardage the two courses are near twins, 6,784 against 6,680, both par 71 or 72, both parkland in the same Fayette County ground. The golf difference is in texture rather than scale. Jones at Griffin Gate, especially after the bunker work, asks the more penal questions around the greens. Hills at the Wildcat spreads its trouble through water, trees and creeks across a bigger, shared facility, and offers the friendlier range of tees for a mixed group.
We set both in context in the best golf courses in Lexington and in the 5 best golf courses in Kentucky.
The verdict
For the visiting golfer staying at the resort, Griffin Gate wins. A top 75 resort course designation, senior tour history and a Rees Jones bunker renovation tied to a $40 million property investment add up to the more polished, more singular round, and the room key that unlocks it is already in your pocket.
For everyone else, and in our overall ranking, the Wildcat wins on the day and on access, which we weight at a fifth of the argument for a reason. A semi-private course that a Lexington golfer can actually join, book and play weekly, that hosts a university program and offers 36 holes on 300 acres, delivers more golf over a year than a resort course delivers in a weekend. The concession to Griffin Gate is real: hole for hole in isolation, its best holes are probably the best holes in this comparison. But a ranking that only counts isolated holes would crown a lot of courses nobody can play.
Pick Griffin Gate when you are in town, in the hotel, and want the event round. Pick the Wildcat when Lexington is home, or when you want your golf the way the Wildcats get theirs, available on an ordinary week.