Town Rankings / Ohio

The Best Golf Courses in Dublin

Dublin was a quiet Columbus suburb with an Irish name and a stone bridge when Jack Nicklaus decided to build his monument there. The Memorial Tournament started at Muirfield Village in 1976 and Dublin grew up around it into Ohio's golf capital in the corporate sense: headquarters money, tournament infrastructure, and three courses within a short drive that all trace back, one way or another, to the gravity of Jack's place. Ranking Dublin means ranking the monument first and arguing about everything after, which is exactly what the town itself does.

We score the golf first. In Dublin the golf and the monument are the same conversation.

1Muirfield Village Golf Club

Muirfield Village is Nicklaus's hometown course in the fullest sense: he designed it, he hosts his tournament on it, he has spent fifty years adjusting it the way other men adjust a favorite chair, a bunker moved here, a green softened there, always in service of the Memorial field. The receipts beyond the Memorial are the strongest of any course on this site list: the 1987 Ryder Cup, where Europe won in America for the first time, the Solheim Cup, the 2013 Presidents Cup. Jack built a course to examine professionals and it has examined three generations of them.

The concession is that Muirfield Village is engineered within an inch of its life, and golfers who love found golf, golf that looks discovered rather than constructed, will always rank it below its record. There is also the small matter that you will almost certainly never play it. Neither point moves it. As a complete championship test kept at tournament pitch twelve months a year, nothing in Dublin, and very little in Ohio, stands with it. First, the way it was always going to be.

2Tartan Fields Golf Club

Tartan Fields is Arnold Palmer's answer across town, a Palmer signature design built to upscale specifications in the same Dublin corridor and kept to a standard that flatters the comparison it invites. Palmer's style runs opposite to Nicklaus's in a way golfers can feel: more swagger off the tee, more reward for the bold line, greens that accept a running shot and a bit of theater. For a strong player who finds Muirfield Village a long interrogation, Tartan Fields is the same examination with better conversation.

It concedes the record, obviously, all of it, and it concedes a degree of polish in the details that fifty years of tournament weeks will teach any course. Second place in Dublin is the best available outcome for a course built in the monument's shadow, and Tartan Fields takes it on design quality rather than address. Palmer versus Nicklaus was the argument of a golf generation. Dublin kept both sides of it, fifteen minutes apart.

3The Country Club at Muirfield Village

The Country Club at Muirfield Village is the companion club, the one built for the people who actually live in Muirfield Village rather than the ones who visit it in May. Also a Nicklaus design, it plays the role every flagship needs and few get: shorter, friendlier, social, the course for the member game, the family round, the evening nine. Judged as a test it is giving up length and menace to both courses above it, and it does not pretend otherwise.

The concession and the compliment are the same sentence here. This is third on championship merit and quite possibly first on rounds its members would choose, week after week, which is a different and defensible ranking. Dublin's depth is that even its third course carries the Nicklaus name and a membership that chose it on purpose. Most towns' third course is an accident of geography. Dublin's was planned.

If you are passing through on a golf trip, Dublin also works as a base rather than a destination: the Columbus courses sit within an easy drive, and the town itself runs on tournament week competence all year, good hotels, good steakhouses, tee time logistics that actually function.

In May the whole town turns into a tournament site and the traffic backs up to the river. The rest of the year it is three good courses and one great one, in a suburb Jack Nicklaus built out of a cornfield and an argument with himself about what a golf course should be.