Town Rankings / Rhode Island

The Best Golf Courses in Newport

American tournament golf started in Newport. In 1895, on an island town built for shipping money and summer cottages, the game's new national association held its first U.S. Amateur and its first U.S. Open, in the same season, at the same club. Every championship golfer since has been walking ground that Newport laid out first. Around that origin story, this small Rhode Island city has grown a golf scene of extremes: one of the oldest and most private clubs in the country, a modern public course one town over, and a nine-holer across the bridge that costs about twenty dollars.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Newport is the rare list where the No. 1 course wins the first two categories outright and finishes dead last in the third, and we rank it first anyway, because some courses are the reason the ranking exists.

1Newport Country Club

Newport Country Club hosted the first U.S. Open and the first U.S. Amateur in 1895, and a course could coast for a century on that sentence alone. This one has not had to. The golf, out on the rocky, wind-exposed point south of town, is links-flavoured in the way early American golf was before irrigation and ego softened it: ground game in play, weather as a playing partner, the Atlantic making every score feel provisional. A century after those first championships, Tiger Woods won a U.S. Amateur here, in 1995, which closed a loop nicely: the game's modern era paying respects at its first address.

The clubhouse, the setting above the ocean, and the sense that you are playing inside the sport's founding documents make the day here unlike any other on this Rhode Island run. Architecture lists rate the course itself highly, and they tend to underrate it anyway, because what Newport has cannot be photographed into a ranking: continuity. The game started here and never entirely left.

The concession is access, total and unfixable. Newport Country Club is private in the old, complete sense, and nearly every golfer reading this will never play it. Estimates of what membership costs belong to the realm of rumour, and the honest version is simply that the door is closed. We rank golf courses, not doors. The best course in Newport is the best address in American golf's first chapter, and it wins this list walking away.

2Newport National Golf Club (Middletown)

Newport National, in neighbouring Middletown, is the public's answer to the closed door: a modern, full-scale course built to give visiting golfers a serious Newport round they can actually book. It plays big and open with the island's wind doing the same work it does at the country club, and it has been rated among the state's best public courses since it arrived. For a golf trip, this is the course the itinerary gets built around, and it carries that responsibility without strain.

The concession is youth, by Newport standards almost a rounding error. Newport National has no 1895, no founding championships, nothing but good modern golf and a fine setting. Against most towns that would be plenty for No. 1. Against the country club up the road it settles, correctly and without embarrassment, for second.

3Jamestown Golf Course

Across the bridge in Jamestown sits a nine-hole course that costs, per the local math, twenty-something dollars, and it might be the best value in Rhode Island golf. Jamestown is the island town's quiet alternative to Newport's scene: a simple, walkable nine where the wind still finds you, the pace stays human, and a round can be an hour and change of your day rather than the whole production.

It finishes third because nine holes of modest golf cannot outrank eighteen holes of championship golf or a top public course, and it would be a strange list that said otherwise. But rankings have a category for what a place means to the golfers around it, and Jamestown means plenty. Newport's list ends on the far side of the bridge, with salt air, a short course, and a green fee that still sounds like a misprint.