Town Rankings / Oklahoma

The Best Golf Courses in Ardmore, Oklahoma

Perry Maxwell is buried beside the 15th fairway at Dornick Hills. He asked for that, more or less, because the place was his before it was anyone else's: his first design, his home club, in the southern Oklahoma town where he lived. Golf architects rarely get a grave with a view of their own work. Maxwell earned his, and the fact that the club has kept the course, and the grave, tells you most of what you need to know about golf in Ardmore.

This is the whole bench, two courses, and we are not going to dress it up as a deep scene. Ardmore is a one-landmark town for golf, plus the public option that serves everyone the landmark does not. The ranking scores the golf first, and here the golf settles it.

1Dornick Hills Golf and Country Club

An architect's first design is usually a footnote. Maxwell's is the headline, because he built Dornick Hills for himself and his neighbors and then spent a career, Alister MacKenzie partnership and all, proving that the instincts he started with were the real thing. The course is where his ideas about using the ground as it lies were formed, on his own land, with his own money at stake. Courses designed as laboratories tend to play with a clarity that client work sometimes loses.

Then there is the burial by the 15th, which we mention not as trivia but as evidence. Architects do not ask to be buried at their third-best course. Dornick Hills was the center of Maxwell's golfing life, and a club that holds that kind of meaning tends to protect its course accordingly.

The concession: it is a private club in a small city, its reputation travels mostly among architecture people, and nobody plans a golf trip to southern Oklahoma around it alone. Fine. Rankings are not travel brochures. The best course in Ardmore is a foundational work by one of America's great designers, and the distance to No. 2 is the story.

2Lakeview Golf Club Ardmore

Lakeview is Ardmore's public golf, the course that carries the everyday game for a town of its size: leagues, learners, the golfer who plays twice a month and wants a fair test at a fair price. Every ranking needs this course somewhere, because without it a town's golf belongs entirely to members.

We will be candid about the gap. Lakeview is not competing with Dornick Hills on architecture and should not pretend to. It competes on access, and on that measure it wins the town outright, since it is the one course here that anyone reading this can simply go and play. Second place, earned honestly, in a two-course town.

Consider what Ardmore asks of a visiting golfer, honestly. There is no itinerary to build, no second day to plan, no resort to check into. There is one significant course, seen by invitation, and one public course, seen by showing up. Golf towns usually sell abundance. Ardmore offers something rarer and harder to market: a single place where an important American designer's career literally began and ended, in a town small enough that the course is still local news. Some golfers will drive past on the interstate and never know. The ones who stop and find a way on will understand more about Perry Maxwell in one round than a library could give them.

Ardmore's golf ends, as it began, at the 15th fairway, where the man who started it all is still watching his first course do its work.