# The Best Denis Griffiths Golf Courses in America Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-denis-griffiths-golf-courses-in-america/ [The Course Rankings](/) Architect Rankings A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Denis Griffiths built golf for the public. That is the shortest true summary of a career our dataset counts at 22 courses across five states, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee, and the list leans heavily toward municipal courses, state park courses, and public layouts that working golfers actually play. Georgia is his home ground, where he designed for state parks and resorts alike, but his best work includes a Civil War fort in Tennessee, a streetcar ride in New Orleans, and 27 holes at the base of the Colorado foothills. Architecture fame usually follows private clubs. Griffiths is the counter-argument, and his best eight follow. ## 1Old Fort Golf Club, Tennessee Murfreesboro's municipal course, established by the city in 1985 to a Leon Howard design, renovated by Griffiths in 2003, and renovated again by Nathan Crace in a 1.6 million dollar project that reopened it on August 30, 2024 with greens restored to their original sizes and regrassed with Prizm Zoysia. Old Fort plays par 72 at 7,214 yards from the back tees, sits on the banks of the Stones River next to Fortress Rosecrans, a Civil War earthen fort, has served as a qualifying site for the Korn Ferry Tour's Simmons Bank Open, and was ranked the No. 1 municipal course in Tennessee by GolfDay. A muni with a fort, a river, tour qualifying, and a state No. 1 ranking leads this list because it shows the full Griffiths pattern: serious golf, publicly owned, at championship length. The town context is in [our Murfreesboro course ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-murfreesboro-tn/). ## 2The Golf Club at Audubon Park, Louisiana The most distinctive course on this list by a wide margin. Golf has been played at Audubon Park in New Orleans since 1898, and Griffiths rebuilt it completely in 2002 as a par 62 executive layout of 4,220 yards: 18 holes on just 81 acres, with twelve par 3s, four par 4s, and two par 5s, set among hundred-year-old oaks on St. Charles Avenue in Uptown. It is the only golf course in the country accessible by streetcar, per Audubon Golf Trail sources, and it was the first course in Louisiana certified as an Audubon International Signature Sanctuary. Par 62 will keep it off most best-of lists, which is exactly the snobbery this ranking rejects. Fitting real golf for real people onto 81 acres inside a great city is design work of a high order. See [our New Orleans course ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-new-orleans-la/) for its local standing. ## 3Pole Creek Golf Club, Colorado Twenty-seven holes in Tabernash, near Winter Park in Grand County: three par 36 nines named Ranch, Meadow, and Ridge, with the Ranch and Ridge combination playing par 72 at 7,065 yards and the highest point on the Ridge nine reaching 8,812 feet. Mountain public golf at that elevation, in three mixable nines, is Pole Creek's whole case, and it is a strong one. Griffiths working at altitude in 1984, early in this dataset, produced celebrated mountain golf that has carried a resort region's public game for four decades. ## 4Fox Hollow Golf Course, Colorado Another 27, in Lakewood: the Canyon, Meadow, and Links nines, opened in 1993, with the Meadow and Links combination playing up to 6,888 yards at the base of the foothills. The signature is Coyote Gulch, the Canyon nine's par 4 fifth, which drops 80 feet from the end of the fairway to the green. Fox Hollow was also one of the first courses in the country designed to be fully accessible to golfers with disabilities, a fact that belongs high in any account of Griffiths. Municipal, ambitious, and ahead of its time on access in every sense. ## 5Brazell's Creek Golf Course, Georgia Griffiths in the Georgia state parks system, at Gordonia-Alatamaha State Park in Reidsville: a pine forest South Georgia layout playing par 71 at 6,821 yards, rated 70.0 with a 130 slope. The signature is the par 3 15th, 207 yards over wetlands to a large, undulating island green. State park golf is America's most undervalued tier, priced for the public and set in real landscape, and a 207-yard island green in the pines is a hole any resort would advertise. In South Georgia, the state park golfer gets it as a matter of course. ## 6Cattails at MeadowView Golf Course, Tennessee Kingsport's municipal course, opened in 1998 at the base of Bays Mountain: a links-style front nine giving way to a wooded, target golf back nine highlighted by two risk and reward par 5s, with six lakes and a winding stream in play. It plays par 71 at 6,704 yards, rated 72.5 with a slope of 130, on Bermuda fairways and bentgrass greens, and it earned Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification. Two distinct nines, one open and one demanding precision, is a classic Griffiths structure in this dataset, and Cattails may be its cleanest example. ## 7Chi Chi Rodriguez Golf Club, Florida The shortest course here and maybe the most useful. A public executive-length layout in Clearwater, par 69 at 5,454 yards, with more than 70 sand traps and water in play on 12 holes, tied directly to Chi Chi Rodriguez's youth foundation: a portion of every green fee supports the Chi Chi Rodriguez Academy and First Tee Clearwater. It is a First Tee facility, which means the course exists to produce golfers, not just rounds. Seventy bunkers on a 5,454-yard course is a designer refusing to condescend to beginners and juniors, and we rank that refusal seventh with respect. ## 8Château Élan Golf Club Chateau Course, Georgia Griffiths at resort scale: the Chateau Course at Château Élan Winery and Resort in Braselton, opened in 1989, rolling through North Georgia foothills terrain as the flagship of a property that also holds his Woodlands course and a private Estates course. It hosts the corporate and charity events that are a winery resort's golf economy. We place it eighth, honestly, because its role is the resort round rather than the architectural statement, and because Griffiths himself built more interesting courses for cities and state parks than for a resort's guests. Even his eighth-best course here anchors an entire resort's golf identity, which says something about the floor of his work. The concession this list owes: Griffiths never built the private masterpiece or the tour venue that forces architecture critics to pay attention, and some of his Georgia work is solid rather than inspired, community and state park golf that does its job without asking to be studied. Fair. But a career spent making public golf better, from a No. 1 Tennessee muni beside a Civil War fort to a par 62 under New Orleans oaks that a streetcar delivers you to, is a career the game needed more of. Start at Audubon Park, where the streetcar stops and the oaks have been watching golf since before Griffiths, or anyone, thought to rebuild it. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.