Town Rankings / Georgia
The Best Golf Courses in Atlanta
Bobby Jones grew up playing East Lake, and then he became Bobby Jones, and the course became the home of the Tour Championship and the centerpiece of a neighborhood rebuilt around it. Across town, Peachtree Golf Club, the course Jones built with Robert Trent Jones Sr. after the war, sits behind gates so quiet that most Atlanta golfers will never see a hole of it. Atlanta golf is those two poles: the most public private course in America, televised every year, and the most private famous course in America, televised never.
The rest of the list is the city's deep private bench: Brookhaven, Ansley Park, Druid Hills, clubs from 1912 and 1883. All five are private, estimates in the high to highest tiers, so this ranking is settled on the golf and the history, and the top two are a real argument.
1East Lake Golf Club
Golf at East Lake dates to 1908, Tom Bendelow's original, reworked by Donald Ross in 1913. It was Bobby Jones's home course. Rees Jones rebuilt it in 1994 for its modern era, Tom Cousins's revival of the club funded the turnaround of the neighborhood around it, and since 2004 it has been the home of the TOUR Championship. The earlier record is not thin either: host of the 1963 Ryder Cup and the 2001 U.S. Amateur.
No course in America carries a heavier combination of personal history, championship present, and public purpose, and Ross's routing under a modern restoration holds up under the Tour's annual exam. The concession: the East Lake the Tour plays is a restoration of a restoration, owing as much to 1994 as to 1913, the ground reworked around Jones's ghost. True, and it changes little. The ghost is the point. Every August the best players in the world finish their season on Bobby Jones's home ground, in a neighborhood the course pulled back from the edge.
2Peachtree Golf Club
Peachtree opened in 1947, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. with Bobby Jones, their only collaboration of its kind in Georgia lore, Augusta's lineage aside. It opened at over 7,200 yards, among the longest courses in America at the time, and its enormous punchbowl green at the 10th is the hole the lucky few who have played it describe first. It is consistently ranked among America's best private courses, invitation only, estimates in the highest tier, and it does not care whether you know that.
Many serious panelists rank Peachtree above East Lake as pure golf, and the case is strong: an original Jones Sr. canvas rather than a restored one, scale and quiet East Lake's tournament machinery cannot match, and a membership that has protected the place from every pressure to publicize. It sits second here on the weight of East Lake's living record, golf history still being written rather than preserved. Preservation versus production. If your ballot flips them, you are in good company.
3Capital City Club Brookhaven
Capital City Club was founded in 1883, and its Brookhaven course, a Tom Fazio design opened in 1991, is the second course of one of America's oldest city clubs, the downtown clubhouse's championship arm in the northern suburbs. Fazio worked the rolling Brookhaven terrain and its lakes into his polished parkland, and the course has hosted local USGA and Georgia PGA events.
Third place is a strong result in this field, and Brookhaven takes it as the best of Atlanta's purely club courses, the ones without a Bobby Jones chapter. The golf is a full championship test, estimates in the high tier. It concedes the top two their singularity, as everything in Atlanta must: no Jones story, no Tour finale, just an excellent Fazio and a 140 year old club. Most cities would crown that combination. Atlanta files it third.
4Ansley Golf Club
Ansley is the unusual one: a private in town club founded in 1912 in Ansley Park, with a nine hole Midtown original and a championship course, Settindown Creek in Roswell, designed by Bob Cupp in 1990. Settindown is the club's competitive venue, with Nike Tour and U.S. Women's Amateur qualifying history, a stern, wooded examination. The two facility model is rare: a city club that kept its in town nine and bought its championship golf a county away.
Ansley ranks fourth on the strength of Settindown Creek, which by itself argues with Brookhaven as a test, while the Midtown nine gives members the in town loop most city clubs sold off decades ago. It gives ground to the top three on cohesion and history's weight, and estimates keep it in the high tier. But the two course answer to an in town club's land problem is the smartest arrangement in Atlanta golf, and members who walk the Midtown nine on a weekday evening know what they kept.
5Druid Hills Golf Club
Druid Hills closes the list, a private club founded in 1912 in the neighborhood that shares its name, classic in town parkland with H.H. Barker in its lineage and a major Bob Cupp renovation in the 2000s. It hosted Georgia amateur and USGA qualifying golf, and Bobby Jones era Atlanta played here, because then every good course in this city sat inside Jones's orbit.
Fifth of five gets the shortest hearing, for scope rather than quality: Druid Hills is a fine in town members' course competing against two national landmarks, a Fazio championship course, and a two facility club. Its charms are local, the neighborhood setting, the walkable parkland, the century of Atlanta life in the clubhouse, and they do not travel. For its members, they do not need to.
Television ends its season at East Lake every year, on the course a boy from Atlanta grew up on, and across the city Peachtree stays dark behind its gates, untelevised, unbothered. Atlanta built the two most opposite famous courses in American golf, and both trace back to the same man.