# The Best Golf Courses in Southampton

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-southampton-ny/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New York


A leading golf course in New York. Photo: Michael O'Connor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A mile of Southampton farmland separates the two most argued over golf courses in America, and the argument has been running for a hundred years. Shinnecock Hills on one side, National Golf Links on the other, potato fields and summer houses in between, and the Atlantic wind over all of it. Add a third course, built in this century by the strangest pairing in modern architecture, sitting between them in spirit, and you have the strongest three course bench of any town in the country. It is not close.

Almost nobody reading this will play any of them. All three are private, two of them legendarily so. A ranking still has to be made, because the golf is the golf, and in Southampton the golf is the reference point for the entire American game.

## 1Shinnecock Hills Golf Club

Shinnecock is the championship course of the three and the No. 1 course in this town, which makes it, on most days, the No. 1 or No. 2 course in the United States. William Flynn's design spreads across rumpled linksland south of the highway, and the U.S. Open keeps coming back because the course keeps being right: 1896, the great Opens of the modern era, the 2026 championship added to the list. The wind is the architecture's second author. A calm morning at Shinnecock is a rumor, not a forecast.

The concession belongs to the National's loyalists, and it is not nothing: Shinnecock can be a grind, a course that beats you with exposure and patience rather than delighting you hole by hole. Delight is next door. But rankings reward the course that tests the whole game at the highest level without a single weak or borrowed hole, and that is Shinnecock. The Stanford White clubhouse on the hill, the fescue moving in sheets, the long walk up the last fairway. It is the American championship ideal, and it has been for a century.

## 2National Golf Links of America

C.B. Macdonald built the National as a thesis: the great holes of Britain, studied, adapted and rebuilt on the bluffs above Peconic Bay. The Redan, the Alps, the Punchbowl, the Short. Every template hole you have played anywhere since is a copy of a copy of what Macdonald did here starting in 1911, and the originals remain more fun than almost all of the copies. The National is the most enjoyable round in Southampton and the most influential American golf course ever built. Both things are true at once.

So why is the most influential course in America second in its own town? Because influence is not the same as examination. Shinnecock asks more of the driver, more of the long game, more of a player protecting a score on Sunday. The National asks more interesting questions. Plenty of serious golfers, given one last round, would pick this one, and we would not argue with them at the table. We would just point at the Open record and shrug. On architecture as pure pleasure, flip the order. On the whole test, it stands.

## 3Sebonack Golf Club

Sebonack is the newcomer, opened in 2006 on the bluffs next door to the National, designed by Jack Nicklaus and Tom Doak together, which on paper sounds like a committee and in person plays like an argument the two of them mostly settled in the golfer's favor. The land is the star: high ground over Great Peconic Bay, enormous views, wind off the water all day. It hosted the 2013 U.S. Women's Open and held up fine. Estimates put its initiation well into six figures, and it is an estimate, because clubs like this do not publish numbers and the number is not really the point. The point is scarcity.

The concession is that Sebonack is still earning its reputation while the two courses beside it wrote the book. Its best holes, out along the bay, belong in any conversation. Its inland holes have more to prove. Third here, though, is a ranking almost every famous course in America would take. Sebonack's problem is purely geographic. It was built next to the two courses every new American course gets compared to.

Stand on Sebonack's high ground at dusk and you can see both of them, Flynn's fescue to the south and Macdonald's windmill across the water. One mile of farmland, three centuries of golf arguing with each other. Nowhere else does that.

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