Town Rankings / Massachusetts

The Best Golf Courses in Brookline

In September 1913 a 20 year old who lived across Clyde Street from The Country Club, a former caddie at the club who was not supposed to be anywhere near its fairways as a competitor, beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a playoff to win the U.S. Open. Francis Ouimet's win is the single most important round in American golf history, the one that convinced ordinary Americans the game was theirs too. It happened in Brookline. Everything else in this town's golf lives in that shadow, and the ranking here is really an argument about how to arrange the shadow and the sunlight.

Brookline has two courses. One is among the most important pieces of ground in the sport. The other is a municipal course a short drive away where the descendants of Ouimet's audience actually play. That split, cathedral and parish hall, is Brookline golf in full. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access is where this list gets uncomfortable, because almost nobody reading it will ever tee it up at No. 1.

1The Country Club

The Country Club hosted that 1913 Open, and it hosted the U.S. Open again in 2022, when Matt Fitzpatrick won on the same ground where he had already won a U.S. Amateur. That bookend, 109 years apart with the same club holding the game's biggest test, tells you the course has not been made obsolete by modern equipment or modern athletes. It asks old questions (position over power, nerve over the short putts) and the best players in the world still get some of them wrong.

This is not a long, manufactured championship layout. It is a course assembled out of a club that grew organically from the 1880s, holes fitted to rocky, rolling New England ground, small greens, rough that punishes the greedy line. The charm and the teeth are the same thing. It feels discovered rather than built, and on the short holes especially it can make a tour pro look ordinary with nothing more than a tilted green and a bad angle.

The concession is obvious and we will not dress it up: you cannot play it. Membership is small, waiting lists are measured in generations, and guest play runs through people you probably do not know. Judged purely on access this course would finish last on any list in Massachusetts. Judged on the golf, which is the order we promised, it finishes first here and would finish near the top of a national list too. The 2022 Open was not a nostalgia booking. The course earned it again.

2Brookline Golf Course at Putterham

Putterham is the town's municipal course, and it carries an unfair job: being the public golf option in the town where American public golf was arguably invented by Ouimet's example. It handles the job with more dignity than most munis get credit for. The ground is pleasant, rolling parkland, the kind of course a town golfer can play every week for years and still find new ways to lose a ball and new reasons to come back.

As a test it sits several tiers below its famous neighbor, and pretending otherwise would insult both courses. The greens are smaller stakes, the strategy is simpler, a good player will score here in a way he simply cannot across town. Conditioning varies with the municipal budget and the New England weather, as it does at every city owned course in the region.

But here is the verdict that matters for most readers: Putterham is the Brookline course you can actually play, at a town rate, without knowing anybody. It is honest, walkable public golf in one of the leafiest suburbs in America, and there is a straight line from Ouimet walking across the street with his clubs to a Brookline teenager teeing off here after school. That lineage counts for something in the day, if not in the architecture column.

Two courses, two different countries, one street address of a town. If the invitation to the big one ever comes, drop everything. Until then, Putterham at dawn, mist still on the fairways, is the most Brookline round available to the rest of us.