# The Best Golf Courses in Lanai City

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Hawaii


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

Lanai has one town, one resort coast, and two golf courses, and the distance between those two courses is the largest gap between first and second on any list on this site. One is a Jack Nicklaus design on cliffs that golfers fly across an ocean to play. The other is a free nine holes in town for residents. This is the whole bench. Pretending Lanai has a deeper ranking to argue about would be fiction, so here is the honest version.

What makes the two-course list worth writing is what it says about the island. Lanai runs golf at both ends of the sport's economy at once, the destination splurge and the town common, with nothing in between. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and for once access produces the strangest result in the ranking: the second course is free, and the first costs more per round than most mainland golfers pay in a month.

## 1Manele Golf Course

Manele is the Nicklaus course on the cliffs over Hulopoe Bay, and the fact that defines it is simple: every hole has an ocean view. Nicklaus built the course on lava headlands above the bay, and the routing never lets the water leave the round. On the signature stretch the tee shots play over inlets and along cliff edges, with the Pacific doing the work that water hazards do elsewhere, except this hazard has surf in it. Golfers who have played the famous cliff courses of the mainland will recognize the genre and still be caught out by the scale here. There is no warmup act. The course starts on the cliffs and stays there.

The concession is the whole practical situation. Getting to Lanai takes a ferry or a small plane, staying there is a luxury proposition, and Manele's green fee sits at the top end of American resort golf. None of that is the course's fault, and none of it dents the ranking. On golf, on setting, on the memory a single round leaves, Manele is not just the best course on Lanai. It is on any honest short list of the best courses in Hawaii, playing in a league the rest of this town ranking cannot see from where it stands.

## 2The Cavendish Golf Course

The Cavendish is a nine-hole course in Lanai City that residents play free. Read that again, because it barely exists anymore in American golf: a town course, maintained for the people of the town, where the price of golf is zero if you live here. Visitors can play too, for a fee that amounts to a donation toward upkeep. The golf itself is modest, a short local nine, kept the way a small community keeps a thing it owns together.

Ranking it second behind Manele is both a joke and completely serious. On architecture it is not within a hundred places of the course down at the bay. On what a course gives its town, the comparison flips. Manele gives Lanai a reputation. The Cavendish gives Lanai golfers. A kid on this island can grow up playing free golf in the middle of town, then grow up some more and look down the coast at one of the great resort courses in the Pacific. Both of those facts are the island.

The ferry ride back to Maui, golfers talk about Manele's cliff holes the whole way across the channel. Nobody mentions the Cavendish. The people who live in Lanai City play it tomorrow morning anyway.

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