Town Rankings / Georgia

The Best Golf Courses in Augusta

For one week in April, the whole sport points at one private course on Washington Road and the rest of Augusta disappears. That is unfair to the town, and it is also understandable. Azaleas and camellias still run through the place because the most famous course in America was built on the old Fruitland Nurseries site, and everything else here plays golf in its long shadow, sometimes literally over the fence.

Augusta's golf splits into three kinds. There is the untouchable private peak. There is the old private club next door that shares ground, water, and history with it. And there is a municipal Donald Ross course where Bobby Jones himself played exhibitions and where anyone can still book a time. We score the golf first, then the day, then what access actually costs you, and on that math the order is not close at the top and gets genuinely interesting underneath it.

1Augusta National Golf Club

Co-designed by Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie and opened for play in 1933, Augusta National has hosted the Masters since 1934, which makes it the rare course that gets examined, hole by hole, by millions of people every single year and still holds secrets. Amen Corner, holes 11 through 13, named by Herbert Warren Wind in 1958, remains the stretch other closing runs get measured against. The par-3 12th, Golden Bell, over Rae's Creek, is its signature hole and maybe the most imitated short hole in the world: tiny green, swirling air, water in front, nowhere honest to miss.

The concession is obvious and it is real. Almost nobody reading this will ever play it. Membership is invitation only, there is no public access, and estimates put the cost of belonging in the highest tier there is, which is another way of saying the number is not the point. A ranking that pretended access did not matter would drop it. Ours does not pretend. It wins anyway, because the design work underneath the conditioning, MacKenzie's width, Jones's second-shot questions, the greens that punish the wrong side of every hole, is the best golf in this town by a distance nobody else closes.

2Augusta Country Club

Directly adjacent to the National, close enough that members can see its property from parts of the course, Augusta Country Club is a Donald Ross design dating to 1927 that shares a border and the Rae's Creek area with its famous neighbour. Brian Silva led restoration work recovering Ross features, and the club's past runs through Augusta's early professional era, including the Titleholders years when the town's winter tour stopped here as a matter of course.

The honest knock is that it will always be introduced as the course next door, and that introduction undersells a Ross that stands on its own merits: his greens, his angles, ground that moves more than visitors expect from this part of Georgia. It is private, with costs in a high estimate tier, and it offers no public route in. But as pure golf it is the second-best test in Augusta, and the gap between it and third is wider than the gap most people assume.

3Forest Hills Golf Course

Forest Hills is the most important course on this list for actual golfers, because it is the one you can play. A Donald Ross design dating to 1926, municipal to its bones, it hosted Bobby Jones exhibitions in its early era, when Jones coming home to Georgia was an event, and it now serves as home to Augusta University golf. Think about that lineage for a public course: Ross laid it out, Jones showed it off, and a college program plays its home golf there now.

The concession is municipal reality. It does not have private-club polish or private-club budgets, and a Ross of this age carries the compromises that public money and decades of play leave behind. What it keeps is the routing and the bones, and in Augusta, where the best golf sits behind gates, a walkable Ross with a Jones connection that anyone can book is not a consolation prize. It is the town's public argument.

4The River Golf Club

The River Golf Club is the modern, public-facing counterweight in the Augusta area, river golf across the Savannah from the old clubs, built for the golfer who wants a full day out rather than a piece of history. It takes fourth here on the strength of that role: a contemporary test, a different setting from the pine and azalea ground of the in-town courses, and access that does not require knowing a member.

The concession cuts the other way from the courses above it. It has no Ross, no Jones, no Masters week gravity, and in a town where history is the local currency that matters more than it would anywhere else. Solid, enjoyable, available. In Augusta, that combination finishes fourth through no fault of its own.

Rae's Creek runs under all of this, past the 12th green the cameras love and through ground the public never sees, and the town goes back to being a normal Georgia city the Monday after the Masters. The creek does not care which week it is. Neither, on the evidence, does the golf.