Town Rankings / Ohio
The Best Golf Courses in Cincinnati
Cincinnati is a river city of hills and old neighborhoods, and its golf matches: established clubs in leafy suburbs, no resort sprawl, and one course in Indian Hill that architecture people discuss in the same tone they use for places three times as famous. This is a connoisseur's town. Three Seth Raynor and Donald Ross era names run through the list, plus a Dick Wilson closer, and the ranking rewards the design pedigree because in Cincinnati the design pedigree is the story.
Access is private almost everywhere here, so this is a list for the lucky and the patient. Score the golf first, we do, and Cincinnati's golf scores very well.
1Camargo Club (Indian Hill)
Camargo is Seth Raynor's Cincinnati masterpiece, built in the mid 1920s in Indian Hill and preserved with a discipline most golden age clubs only talk about. The template holes are all here and all alive: a Redan with real tilt, a Biarritz, a Short, an Eden, each one an argument that a great idea, set into good ground, does not expire. The course is not long by modern standards and does not care. It defends itself with green contours and angles, the way it was designed to in 1925, and it plays firm and interesting in a way very few American parkland courses still do.
The concession: Camargo's devotees can be absolutists, and the course's fame runs ahead of its scale. It is a members' course of genius, not a championship venue, and it has never wanted to be one. That costs it nothing here. On architecture, which is forty percent of what we score and the first thing we score, nothing in Cincinnati is in its league. First by acclamation, and the rare case where the architecture crowd understates it if anything.
2Coldstream Country Club
Coldstream is Dick Wilson's work in Anderson Township, big shouldered postwar golf: bold bunkering, demanding long holes, a course built when the professional game was getting longer and clubs wanted tests, not puzzles. It hosted LPGA golf in its day, which fits, because Coldstream at full length is an examination in ball striking that rewards the player who can carry hazards on purpose. If Camargo is a chess problem, Coldstream is a weight room.
It concedes sophistication to Camargo, happily and obviously, and its backers do not pretend otherwise. What it claims is the strongest modern championship test in the city, and on the evidence of its scale and its tournament history that claim stands. Second place, earned the loud way.
3Kenwood Country Club
Kenwood gives Cincinnati something the two courses above it cannot: 36 holes, close to the city, with national championships in its past from the 1930s, when it hosted a U.S. Amateur and a U.S. Women's Amateur in the same decade. The two courses divide the membership's week between them, sporty, tree lined, walkable golf on rolling ground in Madeira and Kenwood. Neither course is a museum piece. Both are the kind of golf a club is actually for.
The concession is ceiling. Kenwood's best holes do not trouble Camargo's memory bank or Coldstream's scorecard. It is third because this list measures peaks, and Kenwood's argument is depth and daily pleasure, which are real virtues ranked in the wrong category. As a place to belong, it might win a different list outright.
4Hyde Park Golf and Country Club
Hyde Park is the city course of the privates, a Donald Ross routing tucked into its namesake neighborhood, shorter and tighter than the suburban clubs and full of the small Ross cruelties: a green that sheds the shot hit one yard long, a fairway bunker exactly where confidence puts the ball. Members walk it in the evening after work in the city they can see from the high holes. That is a golf life most clubs cannot offer.
It finishes fourth because the land and the length run out against this competition, not because the golf disappoints. Play it if the invite comes. In a town this deep, fourth place still has Ross's name on the routing card, and there are famous cities in America that cannot say that about their best course.