Town Rankings / Arizona

The Best Golf Courses in Phoenix

Most big American cities keep their best golf in the suburbs and their municipal golf in a state of apology. Phoenix inverts it. The city's best course is a muni, set in a park of red rock buttes, home to a university golf program, and bookable by anyone willing to fight for a tee time. That fact tells you more about Phoenix golf than any resort brochure printed in the last fifty years.

The rest of the list is the expected Phoenix mix: an old resort course in the shadow of a famous hotel, conversion-era daily fee golf in the south valley, and one more muni that residents defend like family. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. Phoenix does unusually well on the last two, and this ranking does not hide it.

1Papago Golf Club

Papago is ASU's home and a muni in a red-rock park, and it outranks half the resort courses in its own city. Start with the setting: the Papago Buttes rise off the fairways in rust-red slabs, the zoo and the botanical garden are neighbors, and the whole round feels like it escaped the city without leaving it. Then the golf: a proper championship test, long and honest, the kind of course a college program can recruit to because good players respect it.

The concession is the tee sheet. Everyone in Phoenix knows what Papago is now, and getting the time you want takes planning that muni golf is not supposed to require. Conditioning also rises and falls with the municipal calendar in a way resort golf budgets smooth out. None of that moves it off No. 1. A public course, in a city park, beating private-budget competition on the golf alone is the best story in Arizona golf, and it happens to be true.

2Arizona Biltmore Golf Club Adobe Course

The Adobe is the old soul of Phoenix resort golf, running through the grounds by the Arizona Biltmore, the Frank Lloyd Wright influenced hotel that has anchored this part of the city for generations. The course is classic in the gentle sense: parkland in the desert, palms and citrus, a routing that flatters a smooth swing more than a violent one, and a setting thick with the feeling that Phoenix money has walked these fairways for a very long time.

Why not first? Because gentle has a ceiling, and Papago's golf is simply stronger. Why second, comfortably? Because the day here is the most polished on this list, and polish at this level, in this setting, is a real thing and not a brochure word. If Papago is the round you brag about, Adobe is the round you savor.

3Raven Golf Club Phoenix

The Raven is south Phoenix daily fee golf done right, a course that took an unpromising piece of the south valley and made a lush, pine-dotted round out of it, a deliberate contrast to the desert target golf the city is famous for. The conditioning has a reputation among locals for punching above the green fee, and the layout rewards the player who can work the ball both ways.

It is third because its highs are lower than the two above it; there is no butte, no famous hotel, no college team. What there is, is value and consistency, and in a ranking that counts those things the Raven's spot is earned rather than gifted.

4Legacy Golf Club

The Legacy sits on land with an old Arizona farming family name attached, converted into a resort course that plays friendlier than the Raven and makes its case on setting and welcome rather than severity. It is the south valley round you book for a group with a spread of handicaps, where nobody needs to be humbled before lunch.

Solid, pleasant, a notch below the Raven's test. Fourth.

5Aguila Golf Course

Aguila is the other muni, the locals' course at the foot of South Mountain, priced for residents and loved by them with the particular loyalty golfers reserve for the place they learned the game. The architecture is modest. The attachment is not.

Fifth on this list, first in the hearts of the people who play it weekly, and a ranking of Phoenix that left it off would be a ranking of Phoenix written by a visitor.

The last putt at Papago drops as the buttes go dark red, and a college kid on the practice green is still grinding, in no hurry to leave the best deal in American city golf.