Town Rankings / Louisiana
The Best Golf Courses in New Orleans
The streetcar passes Audubon Park at the speed of a good walk, and through the live oaks you can see golfers on a course short enough to fit inside the park. That is New Orleans golf in miniature: not the biggest, not the hardest, woven into a city that treats pleasure as a public utility. The serious championship golf sits at the edges, English Turn down in Algiers and the rebuilt City Park courses up by the lake, but the soul of it is a short loop under the oaks.
Five courses, all reachable, which makes New Orleans a pleasant exception in Louisiana: this is a public golfer's list. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and the tension here is between the golf column, which crowns the old Tour venue, and the day column, which would crown a short loop in a park and not think twice. The ranking gives the championship course its due at the top, the rebuilt flagship second, and then argues the little course in the park beats two full size layouts, because in New Orleans it does.
1English Turn Golf and Country Club
English Turn carried the city's Tour event for years, and championship golf leaves a residue a course never quite loses: the scale of the ground, the severity around the greens, the knowledge that the layout was examined by the best players in the world and found sufficient. Down in Algiers, across the river from the city's noise, it remains the most complete golf in New Orleans proper. A visitor with one invitation to use in this city should use it here.
The concession is that English Turn's era has passed, and the course knows it. The Tour left, the modern game outgrew its generation of design, and what remains is a very good club course trading partly on memory. Memory, in New Orleans, is a currency the city respects more than most, and the golf underneath the memory still tops this list. First place, with the river between it and the French Quarter, exactly where its legend always lived.
2Bayou Oaks at City Park South Course
Bayou Oaks South is the flagship of the City Park rebuild, the course that came back after Katrina rebuilt City Park golf from ground that had been under water. It is not just a municipal flagship; it is a piece of the city's reconstruction that residents can play for a public fee, and it hosted the Zurich Classic's amateur days, a small share of the Tour week brought inside the city limits. The South Course is the serious test at City Park, full length, modern in its expectations, maintained with a facility's pride in what its existence argues about New Orleans.
It ranks second because English Turn's championship bones still outrank a municipal flagship, however beloved, on pure golf. The gap is smaller than the categories suggest. On access, on value, and on meaning to the city that owns it, the South Course is the most important round in New Orleans, and the ranking says that plainly while putting it where the golf column puts it.
3Audubon Park Golf Course
Audubon Park is a short Denis Griffiths loop under live oaks by the streetcar, and it is the best argument in American golf for the short course. Griffiths compressed the game without shrinking it: real decisions, real greens, real trouble for the sloppy shot, all inside a round that takes the time a round should take and leaves the rest of the day intact. New Orleans golfers have always understood what the rest of the country is now busy rediscovering, that golf does not need five hours and 7,200 yards to be golf.
Third place for a short course above two full size layouts will look like sentiment. It is arithmetic. The day and access columns max out here, and the golf, within its scale, is thoughtfully designed. Its concession is scale itself: Audubon cannot test the long game and does not pretend to. A player who wants a championship examination should go to Algiers or City Park. Everybody else should play the loop under the oaks and wonder why their home town never built one.
4Lakewood Golf Club New Orleans
Lakewood is the city's veteran public course, the round generations of New Orleans players grew up on, and its place in the local culture is secure in a way rankings cannot touch. It makes this list at fourth on that everyday role: a full size public test, priced for the city, carrying the weekly golf of thousands of rounds a year while the famous names polish their legends. Cities run on courses like Lakewood.
It finishes behind the City Park flagship and the park loop because, measured as golf, it is the most ordinary of the serious options. The ranking is not a measure of affection. If it were, Lakewood's decades of Tuesdays would weigh more than they are allowed to here.
5Bayou Oaks at City Park North Course
The North Course is City Park's second layout, the companion round, built for the overflow and the everyday player while the South carries the flagship duties. Second courses earn their keep quietly: they absorb the league nights, the beginners and the second round of a 36 hole day. City Park having two courses at all, after Katrina took the whole complex, is a fact worth pausing on. The North exists because the city decided golf in the park was worth rebuilding twice.
It closes the list because that is its job description. Companion courses rank below flagships by design, theirs and ours. The last image in New Orleans belongs to the streetcar anyway, rattling past Audubon at dusk, oaks going black against the sky, a final group on a short course in the middle of a city that rebuilt its golf because it could not imagine itself without it.