Town Rankings / Minnesota

The Best Golf Courses in Edina

In the summer of 1930, Bobby Jones came to Edina on the way to immortality. The U.S. Open at Interlachen was the third leg of the Grand Slam, the season no golfer had ever produced and no golfer has matched since, and Jones won it in a Minneapolis suburb, at a club that has carried that week carefully ever since. Edina is the Twin Cities' polished inner suburb, moneyed and settled, and its golf matches the address: two private clubs and a public course, arranged in an order the Jones history settles before the argument starts.

That is not to say there is no argument. Second place here is a real contest between a second private club and Edina's public course, and the town's list is worth reading as a study in what a suburb's golf is for. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. Interlachen wins the first two columns by acclamation and loses the third entirely, which is the usual arrangement at clubs of its standing and no obstacle to first place.

1Interlachen Country Club

Interlachen hosted Bobby Jones's 1930 U.S. Open, the third leg of the Grand Slam, plus a Solheim Cup and a Walker Cup. That is a complete history of twentieth-century golf in one sentence: the amateur game's greatest season, and the two great team competitions of the modern era, men's amateur and women's professional, all filed at the same Edina address. Clubs collect one such week in a century if they are lucky. Interlachen has three, spread across ninety years, which means the course kept being chosen by different generations of the game for different reasons.

The golf explains the invitations. Interlachen is a serious parkland test in the classic mold, the kind of course that championship committees trust because it identifies good play without trickery and because its greens have ended more famous rounds than its rough has. The concession is access, and it is absolute: this is one of Minnesota's most private clubs, and the overwhelming majority of golfers will know it only as the place Jones passed through. A ranking can note that and move on. The golf is the golf, and the golf, plus 1930, plus everything since, is first in Edina by the widest margin on this page.

2Edina Country Club

Edina Country Club is the suburb's other private club, and it suffers the fate of every second club in a one-legend town: it is measured against a Grand Slam venue by people who have never played either. On its own terms, it is exactly what its members pay for, a well-kept parkland course at the center of Edina's social life, the round attached to the neighborhood rather than to history. For the golfer who belongs there, that may be the better life. Nobody at Edina Country Club has to share their course with a plaque.

Its concession is the comparison it cannot escape. The architecture does not reach Interlachen's championship level, and the history, measured fairly, is local where its neighbor's is national. Second place in Edina is a good address with a famous shadow across it, and the club's members, playing their golf a short drive from a Grand Slam course they do not belong to, seem to have made their peace with that some decades ago.

3Braemar Golf Course

Braemar is Edina's public course, the city's own golf, and it closes the list in the position public courses occupy in wealthy suburbs: necessary, appreciated, and third. It gives Edina residents who do not belong to either club a real round near home, and a suburb that maintains its own course is saying something decent about who golf belongs to. Braemar also gives visiting golfers the only Edina tee time they can actually book, which, on a list where the top two doors are closed, is worth more than third place usually implies.

The concession is scale. Braemar's golf is municipal golf, maintained to a city's standard and designed to a city's ambitions, and against two private clubs it reads plainly. Fine. Edina's list ends with the Jones course behind its gates, the members' course behind its own, and the public flags at Braemar still out in the long northern evening, which is a fair picture of how this suburb divides its game.