# Kansas City Country Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/kansas-city-country-club-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Kansas


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

A $2,500 receipt survives. That is what A.W. Tillinghast got, on paper at least, when the club hired him on December 10, 1925 to design its new course. The club itself is older and stranger than that receipt suggests. Founded on May 1, 1896, it claims to be the third oldest country club west of the Mississippi River, and it spent its first thirty years at what is now Loose Park in Kansas City, Missouri, playing on a handshake lease of one dollar a year.

One dollar a year. Try getting that deal now.

In 1925 and 1926 the club moved about a mile west to Mission Hills, Kansas, taking over a site that held a Tom Bendelow layout, and brought in Tillinghast to do the real work. That move, and everything that followed, is why this profile exists. Plenty of old clubs have old dates. This one has a paper trail, a hometown hero, a moral failure it had to correct, and a renovation finished in 2026 that flipped two holes to get back to what Tillinghast meant.

## Tom Watson's home ground

Tom Watson learned the game here from club pro Stan Thirsk. He holds the professional course record of 60. Read that second sentence again. Sixty, on a par 70 course that now measures 6,822 yards from the championship tees, with a 74.4 rating and 137 slope. The record is not a trivia answer. It is a measure of how completely a great player can know a place, its angles, its greens, its safe misses, after growing up on it.

The club hosted the first Trans-Mississippi Amateur, and for years its competitive story ran through Watson. Then came 1990. The club rejected Henry Bloch, the H and R Block founder, and Watson resigned in protest. The club changed its policy, admitted Bloch, and Watson rejoined. The cost was permanent in one respect: the club lost its PGA Tour stop for good. We place the course in [our Mission Hills town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-mission-hills-ks/) and in [the full Kansas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-kansas/) on the golf, which is Tillinghast golf restored with care. But the history has to be told whole, because a rankings site that skips the ugly chapter is just doing public relations.

To the club's credit, the correction happened. Policy changed, Bloch was admitted, Watson came back. Many institutions in that era found quieter ways to do nothing. The lost Tour stop stands as the price, and the club paid it.

## The golf, restored

Andrew Green's renovation, finished in 2026, restored Tillinghast's intent. It flipped the 10th and 18th holes and installed new irrigation. Flipping holes is not cosmetic work. It is an admission that decades of small changes had moved the course away from its design, and a decision to spend real money moving it back. That decision, at a club founded in 1896, tells you the membership still thinks the architecture is the asset.

At par 70 and 6,822 yards, this is not a course that wins by length. A 137 slope says the trouble is in the details: position, approach angles, and greens that punish the careless line. That is the Tillinghast test in its usual form. Hit it to the right place or spend the hole recovering, politely and completely.

The concession is access, and there is no way around it. The club is private, in Mission Hills, and estimates for clubs of this standing put initiation well into six figures. Say that plainly: it is an estimate, and most golfers will never play here. That does not lower the course. It does limit what a ranking can do for a reader beyond settling arguments and setting a standard for what Kansas golf can be.

There is a lesson in the sequence for every old club in America. The golf survived because people kept choosing to protect it: hiring Tillinghast instead of settling for what was already on the ground, then, a century later, hiring Green to undo what time had done to Tillinghast. Stewardship is not a plaque in a hallway. It is a series of expensive decisions, made on time.

A dollar a year on a handshake, then Tillinghast for $2,500, then Watson's 60, then a reckoning the club did not dodge forever. Few courses in the middle of the country carry a story that complete. Fewer still bothered, in 2026, to flip two holes and go back and get the golf right.

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