Town Rankings / Illinois

The Best Golf Courses in Olympia Fields

Some towns have a golf scene. Olympia Fields has a golf club, singular, and the town more or less grew up around it. Two courses, one address, and a name that anyone who follows championship golf recognizes before they could find the place on a map. This is the whole bench. There is no third course padding this list out, and there does not need to be.

That makes the ranking simple and a little unfair. One of these courses is a championship venue with a name known across the country. The other has spent its life being compared to it, which is the hardest assignment in golf. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access here means the same thing for both: you need a member. Everything else separates them.

1Olympia Fields North Course

The North Course is Willie Park Jr.'s work, and it hosted two U.S. Opens and a PGA Championship. Read that again, because towns this size are not supposed to have sentences like that written about them. The South Suburbs' crown is not a slogan. It is a record.

Championship courses earn the label in a specific way. They do not trick you. They present a hard, fair examination at championship length, with greens that keep asking questions after your approach shot lands, and they do it for four straight days against the best fields in the world without embarrassing themselves. The North has done that across different eras of equipment and different generations of players, which is the strongest evidence a course can offer. Tests that survive a century of golfers getting longer and stronger are tests built on something sturdier than yardage.

The concession is that championship golf and everyday golf are different sports. For a member playing three times a week, the North's severity is a diet some golfers tire of, and there are days when its sibling is simply the more pleasant walk. A ranking is not a pleasantness contest, though. The North Course is one of the significant championship venues in the Midwest, full stop, and it anchors this list the way it anchors the town.

2Olympia Fields South Course

The South Course has the toughest job in Illinois golf: being the other course at Olympia Fields. Anywhere else in the South Suburbs it would be the headline, the course a town built its reputation on. Here it gets introduced with an apology it never asked for, usually by people who have not played it enough.

Members know the counterargument by heart. The South is the course many of them choose for a normal round, friendlier in spots, a better day for a guest who is not trying to post a score against history. That is a real virtue, and this ranking concedes it fully. If the question were which course to play every Saturday for a decade, the vote inside the clubhouse would be closer than outsiders think.

But the question here is which course is better, and the South loses that argument to a course that hosted two U.S. Opens. Losing to the North is not a verdict on the South. It is a verdict on the company it keeps.

There is also a practical point visitors miss. A guest lucky enough to get one round at Olympia Fields will choose the North every time, for the history, and they should. A guest lucky enough to get a weekend should push hard for the South on the second day. Playing only the famous course teaches you what championship golf demands. Playing its sibling teaches you why the members stay. Clubs with two courses this good are rare enough that wasting the second one on reputation alone is a genuine mistake, the kind people make at famous addresses all over the country.

Two courses, one gate, and the stronger of them belongs in any serious conversation about championship golf in America. Olympia Fields does not have range. It has weight.