# The Best Golf Courses in Bethlehem

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bethlehem-pa/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Pennsylvania


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Bethlehem was a steel town, and its golf still carries the steel money's fingerprints. Saucon Valley Country Club was built by Bethlehem Steel's world, for Bethlehem Steel's executives and their guests, on farmland south of the city where the Saucon Creek winds through some of the prettiest ground in the Lehigh Valley. Sixty holes at one club is a steel company's idea of enough. Then there is the municipal course, where the rest of the city has always played, and the contrast between the two Bethlehems is the honest frame for this list.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access is where this ranking gets uncomfortable, because three of the four courses below belong to one of the most private clubs in Pennsylvania. Rank them anyway. The golf does not care about the gate, even if golfers have to.

## 1Saucon Valley Old Course

The Old Course is Saucon Valley's original and its championship standard bearer. The club has hosted seven USGA events on its grounds, a total almost no club in America can match, and the Old is the course that built that relationship: a classic parkland test through the valley, strong enough for national championships, composed enough for member golf the other fifty weeks. Senior majors and USGA fields have come and gone here for decades, and the course has never needed to shout about any of it.

What puts the Old first among three courses at the same club is completeness. It has no weak act. The routing uses the valley floor and the creek without forcing either, the par 4s ask in both directions, and the whole round carries the calm of a course that was built properly the first time and maintained like a trust fund ever since. The concession is that calm can read as conservatism. Golfers raised on modern drama, quarry holes and manufactured cliffs, may find the Old almost too settled. Settled is what seventy years of championship golf looks like up close. First, without a serious internal challenge.

## 2Saucon Valley Grace Course

The Grace Course is the Flynn course at Saucon Valley, William Flynn's design running through Saucon Creek country, and Flynn people will tell you it is the most interesting architecture on the property. They have a case. The Grace moves with more variety than the Old, the creek is a live character rather than a boundary, and Flynn's routing instincts, his feel for the natural angle, show up hole after hole. The course carries Eugene Grace's name, the Bethlehem Steel president whose club this was, which tells you everything about who built Saucon Valley and why.

It finishes second on championship weight and on the Old Course's week in, week out completeness, and honest Flynn devotees should note how close this is. If the question were which Saucon course a thoughtful golfer should study, the Grace might win. If the question is the best course in Bethlehem, the Old's record and depth hold the line. Second at Saucon Valley would be first in almost any other town in this state, and everybody in the Lehigh Valley knows it.

## 3Saucon Valley Weyhill Course

Weyhill is the third course at Saucon Valley, the one across the road in spirit and in fact, built on hillier ground with a more modern feel and the best views on the property. Members use it the way members use a third course: for variety, for the guest who has played the other two, for the round where the scenery gets equal billing with the test. It is good golf, kept to the same standard as everything else at the club, which is a standard most clubs never reach on their first course.

Third here is a ranking inside a fortress, and the limits are real. Weyhill does not have the Old's championship record or the Grace's architectural pedigree, and it knows it. What it has is the strongest argument in American golf for depth: a club whose third best course would headline the public list in most counties. We are not going to inflate it past its siblings to make that point. Third, comfortably, is the point.

## 4Bethlehem Golf Club

Bethlehem Golf Club is the municipal course, the city's own, where the steelworkers' kids and grandkids learned the game while Saucon Valley hosted its championships up the road. It is an honest muni: affordable, walkable, busy in the right way, with the Lehigh Valley's working golf culture on full display on any Saturday morning. Every golf town needs this course. Most ranking sites pretend it does not exist. It exists, and Bethlehem is better for it.

Fourth is where the golf puts it, and we will not insult it with a higher finish bought with sentiment. The architecture cannot stand beside Flynn or a seven time USGA host, and nobody at the muni would claim otherwise over a beer. But if the measure were rounds given to a city per dollar spent, Bethlehem Golf Club would win this list going away, and the Saucon members who grew up playing it know that too.

Steel is mostly gone from the valley now. The golf it paid for is still here, sixty holes behind a gate and eighteen in front of everyone, and Bethlehem keeps both.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.