# The Best Golf Courses in San Francisco

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-san-francisco-ca/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / California


A leading golf course in California. Photo: WilliamFMeyer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

San Francisco golf happens in weather other cities would cancel for. The fog comes over the hills in the afternoon, the wind works through the cypress, and the courses at the city's southwest corner play in a grey, green, dripping landscape that feels closer to Scotland than to the California of the brochures. It is not a coincidence that the city's best golf clusters by Lake Merced. The ground out there, sandy and rolling and cold, is golf ground.

The list below holds a genuine argument: a private club with five U.S. Opens against a municipal that dragged major championship golf back to the city's public ledger. Behind them, three city courses of descending size and ascending charm. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and we will tell you where that order hurts.

## 1The Olympic Club Lake Course

The Lake Course has hosted five U.S. Opens, and its champions' list has a famous quirk: the greats keep losing here. The course sits on the hillside above Lake Merced, all tilted lies and cypress and greens that slope with the hill whether you like it or not, and it plays harder than its yardage in the marine air, where a drive at sea level in the fog simply does not fly as far as the number on the sprinkler head promises.

There is no ocean view to sell you and no soft hole to rest on. The Lake Course's beauty is severity, beautifully kept. The concession is access, total and unapologetic: it is a members' club, and the public's relationship with it runs through championship weeks on television. It takes No. 1 because on golf alone, the only criterion that could put a muni first is sentiment, and this course's record in the game's hardest championship is the strongest evidence on the page. Five Opens. Zero asterisks.

## 2TPC Harding Park

Harding Park is the municipal that hosted a PGA Championship and a Presidents Cup, which in American golf is close to a unicorn: a city owned course, priced for residents, trusted with the game's biggest team and individual stages. The 2020 PGA, played in August fog with no crowds, showed the course as locals know it, cypress lined and quiet and tougher than it looks on a map. The closing stretch around the lake's edge is proper championship golf.

Harding loses the top spot on the golf, narrowly, and wins the town on every other measure: price, access, symbolism. It is the course that proves a city can run major league public golf, and San Francisco golfers who have played both will argue for it at No. 1 with real conviction. Our call: Olympic's test is deeper and its history longer. But if the question is which course matters more to San Francisco, the answer is the muni, and it is not close.

## 3Presidio Golf Course

The Presidio course plays through the eucalyptus and cypress of the old military post at the city's northern edge, hills and fog and views that open and close as the weather moves. It is a public course of genuine character, quirky in places, with elevation changes that make a walk here feel like a hike with golf in it. Army officers played this ground long before the park service ran it, and the place still feels like a post course in the best sense: handsome, unpretentious, slightly wild at the edges.

It ranks third on conditioning and coherence. The Presidio's best holes are lovely and its weakest are merely interesting, and the fog that gives it atmosphere also keeps its turf a step behind the big two. As a visitor's second round in the city, though, it may be the most memorable: no other course here feels this much like San Francisco itself.

## 4Lincoln Park Golf Course

Lincoln Park is the little course by the Legion of Honor, short and hilly and abrupt, with the Golden Gate appearing through the cypress on its high holes like a postcard the course did not pay for. The golf is modest: short holes, small greens, lies at every angle the hill can invent. Nobody flies to San Francisco to play Lincoln Park, and everybody who plays it remembers it.

That memory is the ranking problem and the ranking answer. On shot values Lincoln Park is fourth here and would be lower on a longer list. On setting per dollar it might be first in the city. Play it late in the day, when the light comes through the strait, and make your own call. Ours is that charm this strong deserves its slot, with the caveat printed on the scorecard: the views are championship class and the course is not.

## 5Golden Gate Park Golf Course

The city's ladder ends, properly, with a nine hole par 3 course in Golden Gate Park: short holes among the trees, a first tee for half the golfers in San Francisco, and a pace and price that treat golf as a park activity, which in a park it is. Recent care has lifted the little course's condition and its standing with locals who use it the way other neighborhoods use tennis courts.

Fifth place, and no apology attached. Every serious golf city needs its on ramp, and San Francisco's sits in one of the great urban parks, a few dollars and a few minutes from everywhere. The kid holing a first putt there this weekend is the Harding Park regular of 2040. The list ends where the golfers begin.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.