# The Best Golf Courses in Fort Lauderdale

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-fort-lauderdale-fl/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Florida


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Somewhere in Davie, on ground that used to be called Rolling Hills, there is a golf course where the most famous groundskeeping scene in movie history was filmed. Caddyshack shot its golf at Rolling Hills in 1980, the course that is now Grande Oaks, and golfers of a certain age still arrive half hoping to find the gopher hole. The gopher hole is not marked, sadly. The course is private now, redesigned by Raymond Floyd, which means the most culturally famous golf ground in Broward County is also one of the hardest to get on. Fort Lauderdale golf in one paragraph.

The bench here is three courses deep and splits the usual Florida way: two private clubs, one of them a 36 hole establishment from 1926, and a big semi-public facility in Plantation that does the volume. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. The movie course wins on a combination of story and a serious Floyd redesign, but it wins by less than its fans expect, because the old country club is a lot of golf and the public option is better than the type usually is.

## 1Grande Oaks Golf Club

Grande Oaks is Raymond Floyd's redesign of Rolling Hills, the Caddyshack course, and the first thing to say is that the golf survives the trivia. Floyd, a major champion who knew what a shot should demand, rebuilt the place in 2000 into a private club course with real teeth: strategic bunkering, greens that defend the correct approach, and none of the sleepy flatness that gives Broward County golf its reputation. It is a player's course wearing a movie costume.

The concession is that the movie is doing some of the work in this ranking, and we admit it plainly. Strip away 1980 and Grande Oaks is a strong, private, Floyd design in Davie, competing with a 36 hole club founded in 1926, and the margin narrows to a coin flip. But rankings are allowed to count what a place means, and no other course in this town means anything outside its own membership. The story is real, the redesign is real, and the combination takes No. 1. Just do not ask the staff where the gopher hole is. They have heard it.

## 2Fort Lauderdale Country Club

Fort Lauderdale Country Club, founded in 1926 with North and South courses, is one of Broward's oldest clubs and the volume answer to Grande Oaks's single course flash. Thirty-six holes of private club golf, nearly a century of continuous operation in a county that reinvents itself every twenty years, and a membership that measures the place in decades. The two courses give members the thing Florida golf rarely offers: variety without leaving the property, and a club life built around golf rather than around the pool deck.

It finishes second on peak rather than depth. Neither course quite reaches the redesigned Grande Oaks standard hole for hole, and the club's charms are cumulative, the weight of a full golf operation rather than a few great holes. Plenty of Broward golfers would flip the top two on exactly that logic, and the argument is respectable. This ranking takes the single best eighteen over the best thirty-six, by a nose.

## 3Jacaranda Golf Club

Jacaranda, in Plantation, is the public's Fort Lauderdale golf: 36 holes, East and West, semi-public since 1970, with Bobby Weed's redesign of the East Course giving the facility a modern edge its competitors at this price do not have. Weed is one of the most respected working architects in Florida golf, and his East is the best public course in the immediate Fort Lauderdale area by a clear margin: proper bunkering, greens with movement, and a history that includes PGA Tour qualifying, which means the place has been examined by professionals and found adequate.

The limits are the limits of the type. Two busy public courses in Plantation will never condition like a private club or pace like one on a winter Saturday, and the West Course is a clear notch below the East. Book the East, accept the crowd, and Jacaranda gives the visiting golfer the best ratio of golf to dollars in Broward County. Third on this list, first on any list a tourist should actually use.

The boats idle down the Intracoastal at dusk, the private clubs lock their gates, and out in Davie the most famous fairways in comedy sit empty and immaculate, no gopher in sight. Fort Lauderdale keeps its best golf the way it keeps its best waterfront: for the people who live here, and the lucky few they invite.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.