# The Memphis Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/memphis-tn-golf-guide/

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Town Guides / Tennessee


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Memphis golf splits cleanly in two, and a visitor should decide early which half he is actually here for. On one side, a private game with real age on it, centered on Memphis Country Club, a 1905 Ross and Fownes club in Midtown. On the other, a public game anchored by a Tour course, TPC Southwind, home of the FedEx St. Jude, the Tour's Memphis stop in various homes since 1989. The two halves barely overlap. Most trips get one properly and wave at the other.

That is not a complaint. It is the shape of the town. Memphis was never packaged as a golf destination, so its golf grew up the local way, clubs for members and courses for residents, and the visitor's job is to assemble a few days out of parts that were not designed to fit together.

## If you have a way in, start in Midtown

Memphis Country Club is the round to build around if a member connection, a reciprocal or a genuine introduction puts it within reach. A club founded in that era, in the middle of the city rather than out at the edge of it, plays a different kind of golf from the modern championship venues: shorter in the drive, tighter in the company, a course that belongs to its neighborhood. The Ross and Fownes names in its history tell you the pedigree is old-line rather than manufactured. Treat an invitation as the trip's fixed point and schedule everything else after it is confirmed, not before.

Colonial Country Club and Ridgeway Country Club are the other private names in the conversation, and the same rule applies to both. These are member clubs, not tee times to be hunted down on a booking site, and a trip that assumes access to all three is a trip built on air. One private round in Memphis, well arranged, is a success. Two is a very good week. Plan for one, enjoy the surprise if the second appears.

Be honest with yourself about which category you are in. If no door opens, Memphis still works. It just becomes a Southwind trip with public golf around it, and there is no shame in that version at all.

## The public trip is a Southwind trip

TPC Southwind is the headliner the public can actually book, and it should get your best day, not your travel day. A course that hosts the FedEx St. Jude asks Tour questions: water in play, precision into greens, trouble that does not care what you paid for the round. Play it once, play it fresh, and give it the morning. Trying to squeeze it in after a flight, in Memphis summer heat, is how a bucket-list round turns into a story about survival.

Around it, Audubon Park Golf Course and The Links at Galloway are the local public counterweight, the places Memphis golfers actually play week to week. Neither asks to be confused with Southwind, and that is the point of including one of them. A trip made only of the hardest available golf misreads every town, and it badly misreads this one, where everyday golf has always carried as much of the culture as the Tour stop. Play Galloway or Audubon on the lighter day, walk if the weather allows, and you will leave with a truer picture of Memphis golf than a second prestige round would give you.

The order, then: a private round in Midtown if you have earned the invitation, Southwind as the public centerpiece, and a municipal round to bring the week back down to earth. If the private round falls through, do not reshuffle in a panic. Add the second public course and keep the rhythm.

When to go is mostly a heat question. West Tennessee summers are hot and humid in the way that changes club selection by the back nine, because nobody is thinking clearly by then. Spring and fall are the golfer's windows, and even summer works if you take the earliest tee time and surrender the afternoon to air conditioning and barbecue. Nobody sensible plays Memphis golf at 2 p.m. in August twice.

The one mistake visitors make is treating Memphis as a one-course stop, flying in for Southwind because the Tour was on television, and leaving without ever seeing Midtown. Even if the Country Club's gates stay closed to you, drive the neighborhood, play the munis, eat in the city between rounds. Memphis golf makes sense only inside Memphis.

At dusk the heat finally breaks over the river and the last groups come in slow, in no hurry at all. That, more than the Tour signage, is the pace the town plays at.

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