Town Rankings / Oklahoma

The Best Golf Courses in Norman

Norman is a college town with a serious golf inheritance. Perry Maxwell worked here, and Maxwell in Oklahoma is like a founding father who actually left buildings behind. The University of Oklahoma's course carries his name in its bones, was redesigned by Tripp Davis, and has hosted NCAA finals golf. That is a heavy anchor for a town of Norman's size, and the rest of the local game arranges itself around it: one private club, one city course, and a university flagship that sets the standard everyone else is measured against.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Norman's No. 1 wins on the golf and, unusually, holds its own on access too, because university courses let more of the public in than private clubs do.

1Jimmie Austin Golf Club at the University of Oklahoma

A Perry Maxwell original, redesigned by Tripp Davis, home to OU golf and a host of the NCAA finals. Read that résumé slowly, because each clause does different work. Maxwell gives the course its bones and its Oklahoma identity; he routed golf across this ground the way he routed it across his home state everywhere, using what the land offered. Davis, an OU man himself, gives it its modern championship relevance, the length and teeth a finals venue needs. The NCAA does not bring its championship to a museum piece. It brings it to a course that can still test the best college players in the country.

The concession is the college-town catch: this is a working university facility, and around the Sooners' calendar the public golfer is a guest in someone else's home base. Tee times bow to team schedules. Fair enough. The best course in Norman belongs to a university, and a town that gets a Maxwell-Davis championship course as its public-facing option is winning a trade most college towns lose.

2Belmar Golf Club

Belmar is Norman's private answer, the club for golfers who want their own place rather than the university's: controlled access, club conditioning, the social calendar that comes with membership in a town where the university otherwise dominates every conversation. On an ordinary weekend, Belmar's members are playing their golf in smaller, quieter company than the crowd at Jimmie Austin, and some of them prefer exactly that.

What Belmar cannot claim is the pedigree. Against Maxwell bones, a Davis redesign, and NCAA finals history, a good private club is simply outgunned, and no amount of conditioning closes a gap that size. Second in Norman is a respectable finish. It is just a finish behind a course with a national résumé.

3Westwood Park Golf Course

Westwood Park is Norman's city golf, the municipal option that keeps the game cheap and local for the people who play most often and get written about least. Every college town needs one, because students graduate, budgets vary, and a town with only a university course and a private club has a hole in the middle of its golf.

Westwood fills it. The concession is plain: it is not competing on design with anything above it, and its third place reflects a thin bench as much as merit. But a ranking of Norman golf that omitted the muni would be a ranking of Norman's institutions, not its golfers. Westwood's regulars are as much the town's golf as anyone at the top of this list.

Norman's order writes itself, really: a championship university course with Maxwell in its bones, a private club in its shadow, and a city course doing the democratic work underneath them both.