Town Rankings / Louisiana

The Best Golf Courses in Avondale

Avondale is a working bend of Jefferson Parish across the river from New Orleans, shipyards and subdivisions on flat ground that the Mississippi made and could unmake. Then the PGA Tour showed up. Every spring the Zurich Classic sets up its tents on Pete Dye's TPC Louisiana, and a town most golf fans could not find on a map becomes the center of the golf week, at least until the wind rises off the flat and reminds everyone where they are.

Candor about geography first, because this list needs it: only the top course is actually in Avondale. The other two anchors are New Orleans courses, pulled in because Avondale's bench is one deep and the metro's golf is one conversation. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. On that scale the Tour course wins at home, the old Tour course across the river takes second, and the city's public regular takes third. Louisiana golf is flat, hot, and year round, and wind is its elevation change. All three courses on this list are really tests of the same skill: controlling a ball when the air will not sit still.

1TPC Louisiana

Pete Dye built TPC Louisiana as the Zurich Classic's home, and the hook for this whole list is the truest thing said about it: flat, windy, and harder than it looks on TV. Television flattens Dye's work worst of all. On screen the course reads as generous fairways and water in the distance. On the ground, in an April wind, the angles close down, the bunkering sits exactly where a bailout wants to land, and the flatness that looked like simplicity turns out to be exposure. There is no tree line to hide behind and no hill to block the weather. Dye on flat ground is Dye with the disguises removed.

The concession is that TPC courses are built for a week of professionals and a year of everyone else, and the everyone else part can feel like playing inside an empty stadium. The scale is Tour scale. But the ranking rewards the golf, and the golf here is the best in the parish and the proof arrives every year when a field of the best players alive shoots higher than the brochure promised. Avondale has exactly one famous course. It happens to be a good one.

2English Turn Golf and Country Club

English Turn held the city's Tour event for years before the tournament crossed the river to Avondale, and that history gives this ranking its shape: second place is the former home of the thing first place now hosts. The golf at English Turn is country club golf with a championship past, a course built to a Tour standard of its era and kept in the private club world since. Players who grew up watching the New Orleans event on television know its closing stretch the way you know a song from your teens, whether or not they have ever set foot on it.

Its concession is time. The Tour standard English Turn was built to is a generation old, and the modern professional game has moved out from under courses of its vintage, which is precisely why the event left. Against TPC Louisiana it loses on current evidence. Against everything else in the metro it loses to almost nothing, and a club that once carried a Tour week carries a level of upkeep and ambition that a ranking should honor in second place.

3Lakewood Golf Club New Orleans

Lakewood is the public golf in this conversation, the New Orleans course with deep local roots that predates both the TPC era and English Turn's Tour years in the city's memory. Generations of local players learned the game there, and a course can hold a city's golf culture in a way no tournament venue can, because culture is built on Tuesday afternoons, not Sunday broadcasts. On this list Lakewood is the round a reader can actually play without a membership or a media credential, and its presence keeps the ranking honest about who golf in this metro mostly belongs to.

It finishes third because honesty cuts both ways. Against a current Tour venue and a former one, a beloved public course is outgunned on design, conditioning, and ambition, and no amount of local affection closes that gap on paper. Lakewood's players will shrug. They were never playing for the paper. The last light in Avondale falls flat and gold across a Dye fairway with nobody on it, wind still moving the flag, the river just out of sight doing the heavy lifting it has done for every course on this list.