Town Rankings / Indiana
The Best Golf Courses in French Lick
French Lick is a small town in the hills of southern Indiana that mineral springs turned into a resort a century ago, and the golf matches the improbability of the place. There are two courses here. One sits on some of the highest ground in the state and charges $350 plus for the privilege. The other is a classic across town where Walter Hagen won a PGA Championship in 1924. Small towns are not supposed to have a list like this. French Lick has nothing else, and needs nothing else.
This is resort golf in its purest form: no munis, no members' courses padding the bench, just two destination courses selling two completely different centuries of the game. We score the golf first, then the day, then value and access. Value is where this ranking gets its argument, because the cheaper course by a wide margin is also the one with the major championship, and a serious case can be made that it should win.
1The Pete Dye Course at French Lick
The Pete Dye Course sits on Indiana's highest hill country, and the setting is the first shot of the argument: ridge top golf with views running for miles in every direction, in a state most golfers picture as a cornfield with interstates. Dye used that elevation the way he always uses drama, as a tool. The course sweeps along the ridges with the exposure turned up, wind in play, trouble arranged so that the bold line and the safe line are never the same conversation.
Scale is the second shot. Everything here is built big, the corridors, the vistas, the sense that the course is trying to outsize the landscape and nearly pulls it off. Golfers who find late Dye work exhausting will find this exhausting. Golfers who want a course to feel like an event, the kind of round a trip gets planned around, will get exactly what the $350 plus green fee promised them.
The concession is that price, and it is not a small one. At $350 plus, a course stops being judged as golf and starts being judged as a purchase, against every other great course in America that money could buy a round on instead. Some golfers play it, love the day, and conclude the Ross across town gave them more golf per dollar by a factor of three. They are not wrong about the arithmetic.
The arithmetic is not the ranking, though. On the golf itself, on architecture and setting and the sheer size of the test, the Dye Course is the biggest round in Indiana, and it takes the top spot in the town it towers over.
2The Donald Ross Course at French Lick
The Donald Ross Course hosted the 1924 PGA Championship, which Walter Hagen won. That is not a plaque fact. It places this course inside the small group of American courses where the game's early major history actually happened, designed by the era's defining architect and tested by its defining player at his peak.
Ross golf ages differently than modern golf. The questions are quieter and they compound: the approach played from the wrong side, the putt that runs away, the hole that looked simple until the green rejected a shot that would have been fine anywhere else. The French Lick Ross plays across rolling ground in the manner of a course built when golfers walked and architects shaped holes out of what the land offered. After the engineered enormity of its sibling, the restraint can feel like a relief. For many visiting golfers, quietly, this is the round they talk about more on the drive home.
The concession is the mirror of the Dye's. Ross cannot match the modern course for spectacle, conditioning theater, or raw intimidation, and a first time visitor with one day and a sense of occasion will probably choose the ridge top. The ranking understands. It simply notes that second place here would be first place in almost any other town in the Midwest.
Play both if the trip allows it, the new giant first and the classic second, and you will have played a century of American golf design without leaving a town most people drive past. French Lick's whole argument is that nobody should.