Town Rankings / Ohio

The Best Golf Courses in New Albany

New Albany is planned the way other suburbs only pretend to be, brick by brick, fence by fence, out in the horse country east of Columbus. Then, low in that landscape and deliberately hard to notice, sits one of the most respected private courses in America. The contrast is the town. Everything here is polished and visible, except the best golf, which Pete Dye built in 1967 to be neither.

This is the whole bench, two private clubs, and we will not pad it into something bigger. One of them is a landmark of American design. The other is the social and golfing center of a wealthy community, which is a different job and, on most days, an enviable one. The ranking rewards the golf itself first, so it is not a tie.

1The Golf Club

Dye in 1967 was early Dye, before the island greens and the stadium mounding made him famous and, for some golfers, easy to parody. The Golf Club is the argument that the early version was the purest. It sits low in the New Albany horse country, quiet about itself, and it has stayed low profile on purpose while the town grew up around it. Courses that need attention advertise. This one never has, and the membership has never needed it to.

What puts it here is restraint. The test is in the angles and the ground, not in spectacle, and it asks questions that do not date. Plenty of later Dye courses shout louder. Almost none are better company over 18 holes, year after year, which is the real exam for a members' course.

The concession is obvious and we will make it cleanly: almost nobody reading this will play it. Access here is as restricted as it gets in Ohio, and a ranking that only counted courses you can book would drop it off the page. That is not our ranking. The best course in New Albany is The Golf Club, by a wide margin, and pretending otherwise to be democratic would just be wrong.

2New Albany Country Club

New Albany Country Club is the town's other model of private golf: the club as the center of a community rather than a retreat from it. Families join places like this for the whole calendar, pool in summer, dining all year, golf as one part of a larger membership. Judged on that full day, it does its job well, and plenty of its members would not trade places with anyone.

Judged purely as golf architecture, though, it is chasing a course that sits on most serious lists of the best in the country. Second place here is not an insult. It is what happens when your neighbor is a Dye landmark from 1967 that the rest of American golf has spent decades trying to get invited to.

There is a final honesty this list owes. New Albany has no public golf of consequence, no municipal counterweight, no third name worth inventing to make the bench look deeper. A golfer moving here without a membership prospect is looking at a drive into Columbus for the everyday game. Towns earn the rankings their golf deserves, and New Albany's golf, for all its quality at the very top, is a closed system by design.

Two clubs, one town, no argument about the order, only about whether you will ever see either of them from inside the gate. That, in New Albany, is rather the point of both.