Town Rankings / Rhode Island

The Best Golf Courses in Providence

Providence does not hide its best golf in the suburbs. Its best golf is inside the city, at a municipal course Donald Ross laid out in 1932, where the green fee has stayed within reach of the people who live around it for more than ninety years. Rhode Island is a small state full of good private clubs, most of them locked. The capital city's answer was to build a Ross and let everybody play it. That decision is still paying off every morning the tee sheet fills.

This is a short bench and we will say so plainly: two courses, one a full-size Ross muni and the other a teaching course that is really a doorway into the game. They are not rivals. They are consecutive steps, and a ranking that treated them as competitors would miss what Providence actually built, which is a pipeline. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access is the whole philosophy here.

1Triggs Memorial Golf Course

Triggs Memorial is a 1932 Donald Ross municipal course inside Providence, and each word in that sentence does work. Ross: the most prolific serious architect the game has had, whose name sits on private masterpieces across the country. 1932: deep in the Depression, when a city choosing to maintain a course of this quality for the public was making a statement about who golf was for. Municipal: it still is, and anybody reading this can book a time.

The golf carries the signature. Ross munis are a special pleasure in American golf because the architecture was never dumbed down for the audience. The routing uses its city ground with economy, the greens carry the slopes and runoffs Ross put everywhere he worked, and the course asks municipal golfers the same questions his private clients got asked, at a municipal price. Players who study design travel to play Ross courses with famous names. Triggs gives Providence residents that education as a local amenity.

The concession is municipal reality. A city course with a full tee sheet cannot hold private-club conditioning, and Triggs has had lean years in its long life like every muni in America. On a wet spring week, the gap between the design's quality and the surface's quality is visible. The design wins the argument anyway. Triggs is No. 1 in Providence, one of the best municipal courses in New England, and the strongest proof on this list that a city can buy architectural greatness once and share it forever.

2Button Hole Golf Course

Button Hole is a short teaching course in the city that charges kids almost nothing to play, and its place on this list is not honorary. Button Hole exists to manufacture golfers: juniors, beginners, families, people for whom eighteen holes at any price is too much golf and too much money for a first try. It gives them real holes at a token cost, in the middle of the city, with instruction around it. The measure of a course like this is not its yardage. It is how many of its kids end up, five years later, on the first tee at Triggs.

The concession is simply scale. Button Hole is a short course and does not ask championship questions, and a ranking of golf has to put it behind the Ross. But notice what Providence has when you read the two lines together: a nearly free place to start, and a Donald Ross to graduate to, both public, both inside the city. Most capitals in America, with far more money, never built either one.

The list ends where it should, on a short course full of kids swinging at the game for the first time, a few miles from a Ross that has been waiting for them since 1932.