Town Rankings / New York

The Best Golf Courses in Ithaca

Before Robert Trent Jones became the name on a hundred championship courses, before the open heart surgery on greens and the runway tees and the whole postwar era of American golf architecture, he was a Cornell student with a pencil. The Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell is his first design, built by the alumnus who would define the next fifty years of the sport. Ithaca, a small college town above Cayuga Lake, owns the first page of that story.

Two courses make the town's list, a university course with a famous byline and a private club with a loyal membership, and we will be candid: this is a thin bench, and the ranking is more about what the Cornell course means than about a deep local fight. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Access, unusually, favours the famous name here.

1Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell

A first design is a document. Young architects show you what they believe before the market teaches them what sells, and at Cornell you can see the beginnings of the Jones method: golf that tests the strong player, heroic carries, the sense that a hole should present a problem and reward the golfer brave enough to solve it the direct way. He would scale those ideas up for the U.S. Open remodels and the resort era. Here they are at college course size, in the hills above Ithaca, and they are fascinating for exactly that reason.

The course is also simply the best golf in town. It is a full size test, hillier and sterner than visitors expect from a university layout, open to the public in a way most courses with this pedigree are not. Students, alumni, townspeople and architecture tourists share the tee sheet, which gives the place a democratic hum that Jones's later private commissions rarely had.

The concession: the Cornell course is not Augusta or even a mature Jones championship layout, and architecture fans arriving with a pilgrim's expectations should scale them. Conditioning follows a university budget, not a resort one. What you are playing is the sketchbook, not the masterpiece. Sketches by masters are still worth the trip, and in this town they are worth first place by a wide margin.

2Country Club of Ithaca

The Country Club of Ithaca is the private, members' version of Finger Lakes golf: parkland, social, steady, the course where Ithaca's golfing establishment has played its member guests for generations. It is a pleasant, traditional test, shorter on drama than Cornell and longer on the pleasures of a club: the regular game, the terrace, the knowledge of every bounce.

We concede the lifestyle argument completely. If you live in Ithaca and play twice a week, the Country Club may be the better golfing life. But this is a ranking of courses, and a pleasant private parkland course does not outrank the first design of the most influential architect of the postwar era, especially when that design is also the bigger, sterner golf course. Second place here is respectable and permanent, barring an architectural discovery nobody has made yet.

Finger Lakes golf will always compete with the lakes themselves, the gorges, the wine. In Ithaca the golf has one trump card no winery can match: the first pencil strokes of Robert Trent Jones, still playable, still public, still asking the same brave questions above Cayuga's waters.