# The Best Golf Courses in St. Louis

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-st-louis-mo/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Missouri


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

St. Louis golf is old money and public parks in the same breath. On one side of the metro, a Macdonald and Raynor course from 1914 that hosted a U.S. Open when Harry Truman was president. On the other, a modern championship venue that hosted the 2018 PGA. Between them, a Ryder Cup course and a municipal layout in one of America's great city parks. Few metros in the middle of the country can line up four courses with four entirely different claims on your attention, and the ranking argument here is really an argument about which kind of greatness counts most.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. Architecture and history put our No. 1 where it is. Sheer championship scale makes its case for No. 2. Access, for once, barely separates the extremes of this list, because the public course at No. 4 is a genuine part of the city's golf life rather than a token entry.

## 1St. Louis Country Club (Ladue)

St. Louis Country Club, in Ladue, is a C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor design from 1914, and it hosted the 1947 U.S. Open, won by Lew Worsham in a playoff over Sam Snead. Template golf from the two men who imported the great British holes to America, built while the style was still new, on the ground where St. Louis society has played ever since. Courses like this are not really ranked against modern venues. They are the reference points modern venues get ranked against, and the survival of the Macdonald-Raynor bones here, in a city that could easily have renovated them away, is the central fact of St. Louis golf.

The 1947 Open gives it the story beat most clubs would trade their clubhouse for: Worsham and Snead, a playoff, and a championship decided by the smallest of measurements on the final green. Play the course today and you are playing inside that history on holes the architects drew before the First World War. The concession: it is small by modern championship standards, utterly private, and its test is precision and position rather than power, which the modern game has made unfashionable at the top level. Unfashionable is fine. It is No. 1 here because architecture this significant, preserved this long, outranks everything else in the metro.

## 2Bellerive Country Club (Town and Country)

Bellerive is the scale pick, the big modern championship course in Town and Country that hosted the 2018 PGA Championship, where Brooks Koepka held off a Sunday charge from Tiger Woods in front of some of the largest, loudest galleries the championship had seen in years. That week is now Bellerive's identity, and it is a strong one. The course asked for power and nerve at major length, the crowds supplied an atmosphere closer to a Ryder Cup, and St. Louis proved it could stage a modern major as well as any city in America.

Why not first? Because Bellerive's greatness is of the championship-venue kind, impressive and somewhat interchangeable at the top of that category, while St. Louis Country Club's greatness is singular. Swap the two and the argument is respectable; we have had it ourselves. But a ranking should reward the course that could exist nowhere else, and Bellerive, for all its horsepower, could be imagined in another wealthy suburb. The 1914 Macdonald-Raynor in Ladue could not.

## 3Old Warson Country Club

Old Warson is the third name in the metro's championship file, the course that hosted the 1971 Ryder Cup, a United States win in the era when that result was expected rather than hoped for. That pedigree, plus a long life as one of the clubs where St. Louis golf business gets done, keeps it firmly in the metro's top tier. The golf is classic American parkland of the postwar school, a sterner, more muscular test than the golden age course at No. 1, and its members have never lacked for confidence about where it belongs in this ranking.

Higher than third is where that confidence runs out. Old Warson does not have Ladue's architectural significance or Bellerive's modern major, and in a four-course list with two venues of that weight, third is both the honest spot and no insult. Most cities in America do not have a third course with a Ryder Cup on its record.

## 4Forest Park Golf Course

Forest Park is the public heart of it, 27 holes of municipal golf in the middle of one of the great urban parks in the country, a short drive from the neighbourhoods whose golfers fill it. After three private clubs, its presence on this list is the point: St. Louis golf is not only a story of gates in Ladue and Town and Country. The park course is where the city's public players learn the game, play their leagues, and walk off greens with the zoo and the museums in the same frame of parkland.

Nobody claims it outranks the three above it as golf architecture, and we will not either. Conditioning follows a public budget, and the test is a friendly one. Fourth place, held with affection, as the course on this list that any reader can play this Saturday. In St. Louis, between the Macdonald-Raynor and the muni, that Saturday round and the 1947 playoff are part of the same inheritance.

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