Town Rankings / Ohio

The Best Golf Courses in Columbus

Every golf town has a founding story, and Columbus has the best one in America: a kid named Jack Nicklaus learned the game at Scioto, hitting balls under the eye of Jack Grout, and grew up to be the standard everyone else is still measured against. Columbus golf has lived in that long shadow ever since, and the odd thing is how well it holds up. A Donald Ross championship course where Bobby Jones won, a MacKenzie university course that Nicklaus himself came home to rebuild, and the supporting cast of a big state capital that takes its golf seriously.

The ranking scores the golf first. In Columbus that produces a clear order and one genuine argument, which sits at No. 2.

1Scioto Country Club

Scioto is Donald Ross in Upper Arlington, and its record reads like a syllabus of American golf history: Jones won the 1926 U.S. Open here, the 1931 Ryder Cup came here, a PGA Championship and a U.S. Amateur and a Senior Open followed across the decades. Nicklaus joined as a boy and the course formed his sense of what golf should ask. The architecture underneath the history is pure Ross: greens set at angles that make the wide side of the fairway the wrong side, bunkers that are exactly where a good player wants to be aggressive, and a finishing stretch along ground that keeps rising in interest.

The concession is that Scioto, like many Ross courses that hosted a century of golf, has been restored and re restored, and purists can argue about which version is the true one. Fair enough. The version that exists now is a championship course that a strong field would respect and a membership loves, in a town that treats it as civic property in spirit. First in Columbus is not a debate. It is a fact with a plaque.

2Ohio State University Scarlet Course

Scarlet is the great what if of this list. Alister MacKenzie designed it in the 1930s, the Depression kept his full plan from being finished as drawn, and the course that generations of Buckeyes played was a strong, slightly softened MacKenzie. Then Jack Nicklaus, the program's most famous son, came back and rebuilt it in 2006, lengthening and sharpening it into a modern championship test that hosts big college and amateur fields. Purists grumble that Jack edited MacKenzie the way a later author edits a classic. The grumble has merit and the result is still the second best golf course in Columbus by a wide margin.

Scarlet concedes atmosphere to Scioto and always will; a university course with a massive practice facility does not do hushed tradition. What it offers instead is public facing championship golf of a quality most cities never get. Play it from the correct tees. From Jack's tees it will take your lunch money and your dignity in that order.

3Ohio State University Gray Course

Gray is Scarlet's companion and, for most golfers, the better day out: shorter, sportier, tree lined, a course that rewards a tidy game and lets a twelve handicap post a score he recognizes. Every serious two course facility needs this course, the one members and students actually play three times a week, and Gray plays the role without resentment. Its greens are honest, its pace is quicker, and its charms are the charms of proportion.

The concession is built in. Gray was never meant to examine anyone, and on a list that measures examination it lands third. On a list that measured rounds you would choose for a Saturday with friends, it might beat its famous sibling. Rankings are not that list, and Gray's many fans in Columbus know the difference and keep booking it anyway.

4Champions Golf Course

Champions is the city's own course out by Whetstone Park, a tree lined municipal test with a loyal public following and a name that promises more than municipal budgets can always deliver. The golf is honest: narrow in places, longer than visitors expect, a place where Columbus's public players keep real handicaps and real rivalries. Conditioning varies with the season and the city's finances, which is the standing concession for every course in this category everywhere, and Champions wears it better than most.

Fourth here, and the course on this list most Columbus golfers have actually played, which counts for something a ranking cannot score. Scioto is the monument and Scarlet is the examination, but Champions is where the city's golf week happens. A capital city needs all three kinds. Columbus, unusually, has them.