# The Best Golf Courses in Latrobe

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-latrobe-pa/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Pennsylvania


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

Every golf town has a story. Latrobe has the story. A boy grows up in a small town in the Laurel Highlands, learns the game at the local club where his father works, caddies, practices on a course that started as a handful of holes, and becomes Arnold Palmer. Latrobe Country Club is not famous because a great player visited. It is famous because a great player came out of it, and the town has never really gotten over that, nor should it.

This is a two-course list and an honest one. Latrobe is a one-club town with a public course beside it, and the ranking does not pretend the bench is deeper than it is. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. The golf at the top comes with the heaviest piece of biography in American sports attached to it, and we have tried to rank the course, not the legend. The legend won anyway, partly because the course deserves it.

## 1Latrobe Country Club

Latrobe Country Club began as five holes and grew, over time, into eighteen, and the most important fact about it is a job title. Deacon Palmer, Arnold's father, was the club's professional and its superintendent, which meant the boy who would become the King learned golf from a man who taught it in the morning and cut the greens it was played on. Palmer learned the game the working way: grip it hard, hit it, find it, hit it again. You can still feel that directness in the place. Latrobe is not a museum piece or a resort showpiece. It is a members' course in a factory and farming town that happens to have produced the most beloved golfer of the television age.

The course itself is a traditional, rolling test, shaped by the same hills that frame the whole valley, kept to a serious standard because the Palmer name sets one. Members play it the way Palmer learned it, as a test to be taken on rather than admired. That attitude is the architecture's partner here: the ground asks questions, the culture answers them aggressively.

The concession is obvious and we will make it plainly. If Arnold Palmer had been born in the next valley, Latrobe Country Club would be a good, respected Pennsylvania club course that few golfers outside the region could name. The fame is biographical. But biography counts in a ranking of a town's golf, because the course made the player as much as the player made the course: five holes that became eighteen, a father who was pro and superintendent at once, a kid with a strong grip and stronger nerve. First place, and the easiest first place on this entire Pennsylvania run.

## 2Glengarry Golf Links

Glengarry Golf Links is Latrobe's public golf, a links-style course that plays open and exposed where the country club plays wooded and enclosed. The contrast is the best thing about it. Glengarry asks you to deal with wind and bounce and to hit the ball along the ground when the day demands it, a different examination from the tree-lined golf up the road, and for a visiting golfer without a Latrobe member in his contacts it is the round he can actually book.

The concession: Glengarry does not carry a fraction of the history across town, and its test, while honest, is a level below the club's. Second place in Latrobe is a real place on a short list, not a consolation bracket. It is the town's open door.

Latrobe's ranking ends with two courses and one shadow that covers both of them, a boy from this valley who took the game to the whole country. Every town on this list has golf. Only one has the King's home course, and the light over the Laurel Highlands still looks, on a good evening, like it is waiting for him to come up the last fairway.

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