# The Best Golf Courses in Wheaton

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-wheaton-il/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Illinois


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wheaton is a quiet, church going suburb west of Chicago, the last place you would expect to find one of the most important golf courses in American history. It is here anyway. One of the founding clubs of the game in this country sits behind its gates in Wheaton, and across town a public facility built in a park does the opposite job for the opposite audience. That is the whole list: two courses, two centuries of golf culture between them, nothing in the middle.

Candor first, because this ranking needs it. This is a two course town, and the two courses are not really competing. One is a private club of national significance that almost nobody reading this will ever play. The other is public, welcoming, and designed to be played by everybody else. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. The golf produces a runaway winner. Access produces the footnote that actually governs most golfers' lives in Wheaton.

## 1Chicago Golf Club

Chicago Golf Club is C.B. Macdonald's first 18 hole course in America, and it hosted three U.S. Opens. Some courses are important because they are beautiful, or brutal, or famous on television. Chicago Golf Club is important because American golf architecture starts here in a meaningful sense: the template ideas Macdonald brought from Scotland, the discipline of the design, the club's place in the founding of the game's institutions in this country.

What saves it from being a museum is that the golf still argues back. Macdonald's templates were never decoration. They are questions, posed in turf: carry this, avoid that, commit to a line and live with it. A course built on questions stays interesting after the equipment changes, after the ball flies farther, after a century of fashion washes over it. Three U.S. Opens were not a favor to an old club. They were recognition that the questions still worked at the highest level.

The concession is obvious and enormous. Almost nobody can play it. Membership is small, the gates are real, and for the overwhelming majority of golfers this course is a name in a book. A ranking that scores access has to record that. Even so, access is one part of the score and the golf is the larger part. The most historically significant course in the Chicago area, and one of the most significant in America, does not finish second in its own town because it is hard to get on.

## 2Cantigny Golf Club

Cantigny is the public parkland answer, and the word answer is chosen carefully. Where Chicago Golf Club represents golf as inheritance, Cantigny represents golf as public provision: a generous, well kept facility in a park setting, built for the community around it, open to anyone who books a time.

It is genuinely good at that job, which should not be undersold. Suburban public golf often means a tired routing through a flood plain. Cantigny instead gives Wheaton golfers maintained parkland golf with room to breathe, the kind of place a town's junior program, its leagues, and its Saturday games can all live at once. For actual residents, this is not the second best course in Wheaton. It is the only course in Wheaton, and it carries that responsibility well.

The concession is simply the company. Cantigny loses this ranking to a foundational American golf course, the way most courses in the country would. Its real peer group is other top public facilities in the western suburbs, and against that group it stands up fine.

There is a lesson in the pairing that bigger golf towns keep missing. Wheaton did not try to make its public course imitate the private landmark across town. No fake exclusivity, no borrowed gravitas, just a well funded park facility that takes ordinary golfers seriously. Public golf fails when it apologizes for not being private golf. Cantigny never apologizes, and that confidence is a large part of why local golfers defend it the way they do.

So Wheaton, improbably, holds both ends of the game: the course that helped invent American golf, and the course that hands it to the public. Most towns get one or the other. Church town, of all places, kept both.

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