# The Best Golf Courses in Montauk

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-montauk-ny/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New York


Montauk Downs golf course. Photo: DanTD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

At the tip of Long Island the weather stops pretending. Montauk is where the island gives up and becomes ocean, and Montauk Downs State Park Golf Course stands in the middle of it, a Robert Trent Jones design in a state park, where the wind and the fog are not conditions but members, present every round, shaping every shot. Golfers drive three hours from the city to play in weather they would complain about anywhere else. Here it is the point.

A candour note before the ranking: Montauk's bench reaches back west along the South Fork. One of our three anchors is in East Hampton and one is a small nine holer in Wainscott, because Montauk itself has the Downs and the Downs is the town's golf, full stop. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and we rank what the East End actually gives a golfer based at the tip.

## 1Montauk Downs State Park Golf Course

Robert Trent Jones in a state park, at the island's tip. The Downs is public, which at the East End of Long Island, a coastline of locked private gates, makes it a genuine civic treasure: championship calibre bones, state park price, and an atmosphere set by the Atlantic. Jones built his usual demands, elevated greens, strategic bunkering, length when the wind is against you, which at Montauk is a direction the wind visits daily.

The fog is the famous hazard. It rolls in off the ocean and turns the Downs into a guessing game of yardages and trust, and locals will tell you the course has two personalities: the bright, breezy test of a clear morning and the soft, grey mystery of a fogged in afternoon. Both are worth playing. The concession is conditioning and pace, the usual state park compromises, and a layout that some architecture purists find more functional than inspired. Fair. But name another public course where the ocean weather writes this much of the script. First place, and the easiest public golf call on the South Fork.

## 2East Hampton Golf Club

Listed here because a Montauk based golfer's realistic premium option sits back in East Hampton: the Coore and Crenshaw course, minimalist, thoughtful, a private club that takes second on our East Hampton list and takes second here too, for a related reason. It is excellent golf in the wrong geography for this particular argument. From Montauk it is a drive back toward the city, away from the tip, and in a town ranking the town's own course, public and weather beaten, outranks the polished guest.

The concession is obvious. Pure architecture, judged blind, might flip this order; Coore and Crenshaw's work is that considered. But rankings are not blind. Place matters. The Downs is Montauk. East Hampton Golf Club is a superb course that happens to be within range of Montauk, and second place here comes with that asterisk attached.

## 3Poxabogue Golf Center

Poxabogue is a nine hole course in Wainscott, small, friendly, and beloved out of all proportion to its size, which is exactly why it belongs on an honest East End list. Poxabogue is where summer people learn the game, where families play nine before the beach, where the grill room lunch has its own following. The golf is short and simple. Nobody has ever claimed otherwise, including Poxabogue.

It ranks third because nine modest holes cannot outrank two full courses, and it ranks at all because a ranking of golf at the end of Long Island that ignored it would miss how the East End actually plays the game in July. The concession: call it a golf centre, call it a practice ground with ambitions, it is still the most democratic golf on the South Fork. After the Downs in a nor'easter, Poxabogue on a calm evening is the game's way of apologising.

Montauk ends the island with a lighthouse and a state park golf course, and the order feels right. The last tee shot of the day, wind up, fog coming, the Atlantic on three sides of the town. Hit it and hope. That is not a flaw in the golf. That is the golf.

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