Town Rankings / Nebraska

The Best Golf Courses in Mullen

Mullen, Nebraska, has a population in the hundreds. It also has, in Sand Hills Golf Club, the course that changed what modern golf architecture believed was possible, and a few miles down the road a second club with courses by Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak arguing the other side. By any sane measure this is the most disproportionate golf town in America. The Sandhills themselves are the reason: a vast sea of grass-covered dunes in the middle of Nebraska, land that looks like a links transported a thousand miles from the sea, because in every way that matters to a golf ball, it is.

Two clubs, both private, both destinations for golfers who plan trips years out. There is no public golf on this list and no point pretending the category works the usual way. We score the golf first. Here, the golf is the entire conversation.

1Sand Hills Golf Club

In 1995 Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw built Sand Hills and the design world tilted. The context matters. Golf in that era was manufacturing drama, moving mountains of earth, building waterfalls in the desert. Coore and Crenshaw went to the middle of Nebraska, walked the dunes, and found holes rather than building them, routing a course through the sand hills with minimal shaping because the land had already done the work over thousands of years. It is routinely ranked the finest modern course in America, and the ranking has never really been in danger.

The golf itself is the argument the photographs cannot make. Wind is the primary defence and it changes by the hour. The ground game is alive here in a way American golf had nearly forgotten: balls run, approaches can be bounced in, and the dunes punish arrogance and reward imagination in equal measure. Every architect working today either learned from this course or is pretending not to have.

The concession, and it is the only one available, is access. Sand Hills is private and remote, a course most golfers will only ever read about, and there is a fair argument that a ranking should care. We rank the golf. On the golf, this is not the best course in Mullen. It is close to the best course built in the last fifty years, anywhere.

2Dismal River Club

Most second-place courses get a paragraph of sympathy. Dismal River gets something better: it has a genuine counterargument, built in two instalments. First came a Jack Nicklaus course, big and bold in the dunes down the road from Sand Hills. Then the club added a Tom Doak course, and Doak, whose whole philosophy runs toward the minimalism Sand Hills revived, built his version on the same kind of ground. One club, two opposed answers to the question Sand Hills asked. As a design debate you can play, it is unmatched anywhere.

Dismal River also plays the destination game harder: a club built for visiting groups, staying on site, playing everything. Against almost any other town in America, it takes first place and the argument ends there.

It loses here for one reason only, and the reason is the neighbour. Sand Hills is the original, the course that proved this landscape and started the argument Dismal River is still having. Second to Sand Hills is the most distinguished second place in American golf. Mullen keeps both, a town of a few hundred people holding the past thirty years of golf design history in two clubhouses, with the dunes rolling on past both of them, indifferent and magnificent.