# The Best Golf Courses in Honolulu

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-honolulu-hi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Hawaii


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

Honolulu's golf is a study in opposites sharing one small city. At one end, a Seth Raynor course behind a membership gate hosts the PGA Tour every January. At the other, a flat municipal course beside Waikiki claims to be the busiest golf course in the world. Both claims are true, and a ranking of this town has to hold them at the same time without blinking.

Candor about the bench: Honolulu proper is not deep. The resort golf most visitors play sits outside the city, in Kapolei and Ko Olina and up at Turtle Bay, and the city's own list is two private clubs, a famous muni, and a nine-hole relic. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Honolulu those three scores point in wildly different directions, which is what makes the list fun to argue.

## 1Waialae Country Club

Waialae is a Raynor, and that word ends most arguments. Seth Raynor's template architecture, his Redans and Biarritz and Alps concepts translated into Hawaiian ground behind Diamond Head, has hosted the Sony Open for the PGA Tour long enough that January golf fans know its holes by sight: the palm-framed greens, the tour field playing a Golden Age design in modern conditions. It is the best golf course in Honolulu by acclamation of the only jury that has tested everyone on this list side by side, history.

The concession is the gate. Waialae is private, membership money in the highest estimate tier, and the public's access to a Raynor in paradise is a television broadcast. We rank golf first, so it wins. But a golfer visiting Honolulu without a connection will experience this course exactly the way the rest of the world does, on TV in January, which is a strange fate for a No. 1.

## 2Oahu Country Club

Oahu Country Club is the city's other private answer, one of the oldest clubs in the islands, set up in the green folds of Nuuanu Valley where Honolulu turns from towers to jungle in about fifteen minutes. The golf is intimate where Waialae is grand: valley golf, trade winds filtered through ridges, a member's course in the full sense, built for the families who have played it for generations rather than for a tour field one week a year.

The concession is profile. It hosts nothing televised, sells nothing to visitors, and from outside the gate its case rests on reputation and setting rather than a public record. That is enough for second in a four-course town, because the setting is genuinely unlike any other club golf in Hawaii: rain-green valley walls, city noise gone, the oldest kind of Hawaiian country club calm.

## 3Ala Wai Golf Course

Ala Wai claims to be the world's busiest golf course, and standing on its first tee at midday, watching the stream of golfers of every age and level work through, you will not argue. This is Waikiki's municipal course, flat as a parking lot, wedged between the Ala Wai Canal and the towers, Diamond Head watching over the whole scruffy, joyful operation. As architecture it is the weakest course on this list and it is not close. As a piece of golf culture it might be the strongest course in Hawaii.

The concession and the compliment are the same fact. Nobody flies to Oahu for Ala Wai's design. Everybody who loves golf should see it once, because this is what the game looks like when it belongs entirely to a city: cheap, packed, unpretentious, locals playing the same flat holes they have played for decades. Third place, earned on the day and the access, with the golf itself cheerfully admitted as the least of it.

## 4Moanalua Golf Club

Moanalua is the nine-holer, a small semi-public course with roots in the 1890s, among the first golf ever played in Hawaii. Nine holes, modest ground, and a history out of all proportion to its size: when golf in the islands was a new transplant, this is the kind of ground it landed on. It survives as the game's local memory, a quick nine for the neighborhood rather than a destination for anyone.

The concession is scale, again. A short nine cannot outrank a Raynor, an old valley club, or the busiest muni on earth, and Moanalua does not ask to. Fourth in Honolulu, first in seniority, and a reminder that this city's golf history started small and muddy long before the tour trucks arrived.

In January the Raynor gets the cameras. The other 51 weeks, Honolulu golf belongs to a flat muni by a canal, full from dawn, and the busiest claim in golf starts to look less like trivia and more like a ranking of its own.

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