Town Rankings / Wisconsin

The Best Golf Courses in Milwaukee

In August 1996 a twenty year old Tiger Woods played his first tournament as a professional at Brown Deer Park, said "Hello, world" to the cameras, and Milwaukee County's public golf system got a piece of golf history no private club in Wisconsin can match. Brown Deer hosted the Greater Milwaukee Open for years after that. A muni. That fact tells you more about Milwaukee golf than any ranking can: this is a county that built golf for everybody, fifteen courses deep, while its one great private club stayed behind its gates in River Hills and said very little.

So Milwaukee's list has a split personality and we will not smooth it over. The best golf course in the metro is one almost no reader will ever play. The courses Milwaukee golfers actually play belong to the county. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here those criteria fight each other on every line.

1Milwaukee Country Club (River Hills)

Milwaukee Country Club is the finest private golf in the metro and one of the most tradition bound clubs in the Midwest, an old parkland course along the Milwaukee River that has resisted every era's fashion and come out looking correct. The membership does not advertise, the club does not court rankings, and the golf, by every account that escapes the gates, is the real thing: classic architecture on lovely ground, kept exactly as it should be.

The concession is total, and it is access. A ranking that most readers cannot act on at No. 1 is a ranking with a hole in it, and we know it. If you need an invitation explained, you are not getting one.

Quality still wins the top spot. Milwaukee Country Club is the course every other course in this metro is measured against in private conversation, and a list that ducked it for accessibility points would be lying about the golf.

2Brown Deer Park Golf Course

Brown Deer is the county's flagship and Milwaukee's public answer to any private club in the state. It held a PGA Tour event, the Greater Milwaukee Open, for over a decade, and it holds the Tiger debut, which is the kind of history that cannot be bought or built. The course remains a serious test: long, treed, honest parkland golf that tour players respected and that still separates a county field better than anywhere else in the system.

The concession is the one every flagship muni carries. Maintenance budgets are public budgets, conditions swing with the county's fortunes, and the course golfers get in a wet spring is a shadow of the one the tour saw in August.

None of that dents what Brown Deer is. It is the most important public golf course in Milwaukee, the people's championship venue, and second here only because a genuine classic sits behind gates up the road.

3Dretzka Park Golf Course

Dretzka Park is the county system's other championship scale course, out on the northwest side, long enough and hard enough to host serious amateur golf and to give low handicappers a public round that asks real questions. In the internal pecking order of Milwaukee muni golfers, Dretzka is the connoisseur's alternative to Brown Deer: fewer crowds around its name, plenty of golf course underneath it.

The concession is that it lives in Brown Deer's shadow and always will. The history happened at the other park, the tour happened at the other park, and Dretzka's excellence is a local's fact rather than a public one.

Local facts are what rankings are for. Third in Milwaukee, and the first tee time a serious public golfer should book after Brown Deer.

4Lincoln Park Golf Course Milwaukee

Lincoln Park is the county system's short course on the north side, nine holes along the river flats, the kind of place a city keeps for beginners, juniors, quick evening golf and players who measure a course by whether it got them outside. It is not competing with the three above it on architecture and was never meant to.

The concession is scale, honestly stated: this is a fraction of the golf the others offer, and fourth place here reflects that without apology.

But a fifteen course county system needs its Lincoln Parks as much as its Brown Deers. The pipeline of Milwaukee golfers starts on courses like this one, in the low ground by the river, with a cheap tee time and the whole summer evening ahead.