Town Rankings / Massachusetts

The Best Golf Courses in Boston

Boston's famous golf is mostly not in Boston. The private clubs the world pictures when it thinks of this city's golf sit in the suburbs, under other towns' names, and they will get their own lists. Inside the city limits, Boston golf is two municipal courses. That sounds like a confession. It is closer to a boast the city never makes about itself: one of its two munis is a Donald Ross course built by WPA labor in Hyde Park, and the other, at Franklin Park, has roots as America's second oldest public course. Most American cities would trade their whole public inventory for either one.

So this is a two course ranking, the whole bench, and we will not inflate it. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and with two public courses the access column ties at full marks, which leaves the thing rankings are supposed to settle: the golf. One of these courses is a Ross that Bostonians rank with the region's private clubs. The other is a piece of the game's founding public history. The order below gives the design argument the top spot, and gives the Franklin Park course the respect its age and its everyday role have earned, and the argument between them says more about what a city owes its golfers than most five course lists manage.

1George Wright Golf Course

George Wright is a Donald Ross course in Hyde Park, built in the WPA era, when the federal government put unemployed men to work building, among other things, a municipal golf course with a real architect's routing on rocky, rolling ground. Ross on a muni budget sounds like a contradiction, and Boston golfers have spent decades pointing out that it is not: the bones are Ross, the green sites and the use of the terrain unmistakably his, carried out in stone and ledge that give the course a ruggedness no flat city layout can fake. The local verdict, repeated often enough to qualify as consensus, is that George Wright holds its own in conversations about the region's private courses. A municipal course in that conversation at all is the whole case for No. 1.

The concession is the municipal condition of the thing: city budgets, heavy play, the wear that comes with being loved by an entire city's golf public. George Wright's best holes can be let down by its hardest used weeks, and nobody who plays it pretends otherwise. But the ranking measures the golf underneath the wear, and underneath the wear is a Ross routing that a private club would boast about in its centennial book. Boston's best course is a muni. First place.

2William J. Devine Golf Course

The William J. Devine course at Franklin Park carries roots as America's second oldest public course, golf in a great urban park that was part of the game's first public chapter in this country. That is not a trivia answer. It means public golf in Boston is not an afterthought or a consolation tier; it is where the city's golf started, in a park built for everybody, and the Devine course still does that founding job: first rounds, league nights, the everyday game of a dense city where private golf is a suburb away and a world apart.

It finishes second because George Wright's design pedigree is a level above, and pretending history outranks architecture would be the kind of sentimentality this site avoids. The honest summary is that Boston's No. 2 public course is a historic artifact that still functions perfectly well as a golf course, and most cities have neither one of these. The last light falls over Franklin Park and Hyde Park at about the same hour, two city courses going quiet, and the whole of Boston's in-town golf with them. Two courses were enough. They usually are, when they are the right two.