Town Rankings / New York
The Best Golf Courses in Mamaroneck
Six U.S. Opens. Read the list of American courses that have hosted six U.S. Opens and you are reading the shortest list in the sport. Winged Foot Golf Club's West Course in Mamaroneck is on it, and the reason is standing on every green: A.W. Tillinghast built putting surfaces that defend par all by themselves, sloped and sectioned and cruel at championship speed, so that the U.S. Open keeps coming back to Westchester to watch the best players in the world three putt.
Mamaroneck's ranking is a family fight. Winged Foot has two courses, West and East, both Tillinghast, both at the same club, and the town's list is those two and only those two. That is not a thin bench. That is a club so strong its second course would headline most counties in America. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Access is private and equally closed for both, so this is a pure architecture argument between siblings.
1Winged Foot Golf Club West Course
The West is the argument for No. 1 in Westchester every year, and most years nationally it is an argument for the top ten in America. Six U.S. Opens have been played here because the course does the USGA's favourite trick: it looks straightforward from the tee and gets harder with every step toward the hole. Fairways that must be found. Approaches that must be shaped and, above all, placed, because Tillinghast's greens turn a careless iron into a defensive putt from the wrong section, and a defensive putt on these surfaces is how rounds go to die.
The championship record is the evidence, and it is not ancient history doing the work. The West has produced Opens remembered for collapse and for brilliance, the twin possibilities that define a great championship course. Massacre and masterpiece, same greens. The par 4s are the core of it: long, angled, honest, with no trick except the one waiting on the putting surface.
The concession is that the West, set up hard, is not fun in the ordinary sense. It is an examination that most of us fail, and members who play it weekly have a stoicism about bogeys that borders on monastic. At everyday setups it breathes a little. A little. We rank it first anyway, because a ranking of courses that flinches from difficulty would have nothing to say about Winged Foot at all. This is the sternest, finest test in the county and the anchor of the town's claim to golf history.
2Winged Foot Golf Club East Course
The East is the most unfortunate second course in America, because anywhere else it is a first course and a famous one. Tillinghast again, on the same property, with the same green building genius in a slightly gentler register. The East has hosted championship golf of its own, and members are divided, genuinely divided, on which course they would choose if they could only play one for a season. Many choose the East. It asks similar questions at a volume a good club golfer can answer more often, and its pleasures are less entangled with survival.
Why second? Because the West's highs are higher, its Opens are the club's public identity, and its greens at full menace are the single most distinctive architectural feature in Westchester golf. The East loses the way a great novel loses to a greater one by the same author. The concession, and it is a big one: for a handicap golfer playing one round as a guest, the East might honestly produce the better day, more pars, more birdies looked at, more golf shots that come off. If your host offers the East, do not perform disappointment. Half the membership would envy you.
Two courses, one clubhouse, six Opens between the family. Mamaroneck is a commuter town with a golf club that the national championship cannot quit, and every September the members go back to arguing East versus West as if the matter were undecided. It is decided here. It will never be decided there.