# The Best Golf Courses in Memphis

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-memphis-tn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Tennessee


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

Memphis has had a PGA Tour stop since long before the current sponsor names, and the tournament has lived in a few different homes around the city. Since 1989 the Memphis stop has settled into its modern era, and the event now called the FedEx St. Jude is the week each year when the rest of the golf world remembers this city has serious courses. The other fifty one weeks belong to the clubs, the munis, and the heat.

Memphis golf splits into three worlds that barely touch each other. There is a private old guard in Midtown, there are modern club courses out east built for the suburbs, and there is a public game that is cheap, flat, and played in air so thick in August that the ball seems to fly through soup. This ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then what it takes to get on. The order will annoy every world a little, which is usually a sign it is about right.

## 1Memphis Country Club

Memphis Country Club is a 1905 Ross-Fownes club in Midtown, and it takes the top spot on the strength of pedigree that is not marketing copy. A club founded in 1905, touched by Donald Ross and William Fownes, carries the kind of design lineage that most American cities simply do not have. Midtown placement matters too. This is golf woven into the old city, not a development that happens to have fairways.

The concession writes itself. It is private, old line, and not a door that opens for visitors, and some golfers will dock it for a scale that is intimate rather than grand. Fine. Intimacy is part of the test here, a course that rewards positioning and a good short game over the modern power examination. On architecture and on the weight of the place itself, Memphis Country Club is the best golf course in Memphis, and the Tour venue down the road does not change that.

## 2TPC Southwind

TPC Southwind hosts the FedEx St. Jude, the Tour's Memphis stop, and it is the course on this list that a visiting golfer has actually watched on television, which gives it a kind of evidence no other Memphis course can offer. You can see exactly what it asks, because every August the best players in the world answer those questions in public, in the worst heat of the year, and the course holds up.

What it does not have is the old club's soul, and its own players would mostly concede that. Stadium golf is built to be watched and to test, and Southwind does both jobs well. It is penal in the places Tour golf is supposed to be penal, water lurking where a lazy swing goes to die. Second place here is no insult. It is the most proven examination in the city, beaten only by a classic with a hundred and twenty years of head start.

## 3Colonial Country Club Memphis

Colonial is the east Memphis club answer, tournament tested in its own era and still the name older Memphis golfers bring up when the conversation turns to which course hosted real golf before the Tour settled at Southwind. The course has the bones of a championship test, longer and brawnier in feel than the Midtown club.

It sits third because the top two each own a clearer identity, one classic, one modern Tour venue, and Colonial lives between those stools. That is also its strength for members, who get serious golf without either the old guard formality or the stadium edges. A very good course, honestly placed.

## 4Ridgeway Country Club

Ridgeway is the polished suburban club of the group, the Poplar corridor version of Memphis golf, kept to a high standard and played by people who take their club golf seriously without needing a Tour logo on the gate. The conditioning argument is the one its members make, and by most accounts they make it truthfully.

Where it loses ground is distinctiveness. Ask a golfer to describe Ridgeway a month after playing it and the answer tends to be praise without a specific hole attached. Fourth in this city is still a strong course. It just plays in the shadow of two famous names and one old rival.

## 5The Links at Galloway

Galloway is where public Memphis actually plays, a city course with a loyal local following and a name that keeps it separate from the private list above. We put it ahead of its public sibling below for the simple reason that when Memphians argue about their munis, Galloway is the one they defend.

The concession is that municipal golf everywhere lives on a municipal budget, and Galloway is no exception. Conditioning varies with the season and the city's priorities. What does not vary is access. Anyone can walk up and play it, and in a ranking weighted partly on what a course costs you in connections, that counts.

## 6Audubon Park Golf Course

Audubon Park is the other half of the city's public pair, set in the park in the middle of town, shorter on drama and long on convenience. It is the after work round, the game you can decide on at lunch. Every golf city needs one of these and most rankings pretend it does not exist.

We list it last because somebody has to be last, and on pure golf it cannot run with the clubs above it. But the last round played in Memphis tonight will probably be here or at Galloway, in the long summer light, for very little money. The private clubs will be quiet by then. Make of that what you will.

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