Town Rankings / North Carolina

The Best Golf Courses in Winston-Salem

Old Town Club was built in 1939 by Perry Maxwell for the Reynolds family, and for a long time it was North Carolina's quiet argument: the course architects talked about while the magazines drove past on their way to Pinehurst. That stopped being true after 2013. Now Winston-Salem has the opposite problem. The best course in town is famous, and the rest of a genuinely good bench has to live next to it.

This is a Piedmont town, rolling ground and hardwoods, and the golf matches the land. Two Maxwell designs, a Donald Ross, and a Robert Trent Jones Sr. championship course in a county park. No resort corridor, no cart barn full of rental sets with someone else's logo. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it takes to get on. By that measure the top spot is not close, and the fight worth having is for second.

1Old Town Club

Start with the facts, because they stack up fast. Maxwell opened Old Town in 1939. It is the home course of Wake Forest golf, which makes it Arnold Palmer's college course. In 2013 Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw restored Maxwell's bunkers and greens, and the course jumped to the top 30 classic courses in Golfweek's rankings and sits as the No. 2 classic course in North Carolina. It holds, in most accounts, Maxwell's only surviving double green, shared by the 8th and 17th.

That is a pedigree list, and pedigrees can be a trap. Plenty of restored classics play like museums, admired and a little embalmed. Old Town's defence is that the restoration was an act of recovery, not cosmetics: Coore and Crenshaw gave Maxwell back his own course, and what came back was a routing that uses the rolling ground the way Maxwell always did, greens that ask questions in his voice. Golfers who keep underrated lists have had it near the top for years. They are not doing it a favour. It earns the spot.

The concession is the obvious one. Old Town is private, properly private, and estimates put the cost of belonging well into the high tiers. Most golfers reading this will never play it, and a ranking that pretends otherwise is dishonest. We rank courses, not tee time availability. On golf alone, nothing in the Triad is arguing with this course, and very little in the state is either.

2Tanglewood Park Championship Course

Here is the best counterpunch to Old Town's privacy in the whole state: a Robert Trent Jones Sr. championship course, opened in 1957, owned by Forsyth County and sitting in a public park in Clemmons. Tanglewood hosted the 1974 PGA Championship and the 1986 U.S. Amateur Public Links, and it held a senior Tour stop in the Vantage Championship era. Municipal courses are not supposed to have a record like that. This one does, and anyone can play it.

Jones built big, demanding championship golf in that period, and Tanglewood is that style at full strength, a course long enough and hard enough to test a PGA field in 1974 and still ask serious questions now. The honest knock is that Jones Sr. at his most muscular can feel like an examination you sit rather than a walk you enjoy, hole after hole of length and sand. Some golfers leave admiring it more than loving it.

That is a real criticism and it still does not move it out of second. A public course with a major championship on its record, an hour's argument from nobody, is a rare thing in American golf. Winston-Salem golfers can play a major venue on a county budget. Most towns cannot say that about anything.

3Forsyth Country Club

Forsyth is the establishment entry: a Donald Ross design from the mid 1910s, the club founded in 1913, private, in town, and played by a membership that has walked it in every season for generations. Ross in the Triad means the familiar virtues, greens with real tilt and fall, short grass doing the defending, a course that rewards the golfer who thinks a shot ahead over the one who hits it furthest.

It lands third on a simple problem of company. Above it sit a restored Maxwell that the whole country now rates, and a public course that hosted a major. Ross partisans will say Forsyth is the purest golf of the three on an ordinary Tuesday, and they might be right. But rankings weigh the full case, and Forsyth's case is quieter: very good classic golf, no national moment to point at. Third in this town is a strong finish anywhere else.

4Reynolds Park Golf Course

The second Maxwell in town is a city muni, and that sentence alone should get Reynolds Park more attention than it gets. Maxwell laid it out in 1940, a year after Old Town, and while nobody sane claims it is Old Town's equal, the lineage is real: same designer's hand, same Piedmont ground, open to anyone who pays a municipal green fee.

The concession writes itself. A city budget is a city budget, and Reynolds Park cannot match the conditioning or the restoration money of the private courses above it. What it offers instead is the thing the rest of this list mostly cannot: access. A golfer can stand on a Perry Maxwell course in Winston-Salem without knowing a single member. On value, that might make it first. On golf, fourth, and the gap between the two rankings is exactly the story of this town: a famous private course, a major venue in a county park, a Ross behind a gate, and Maxwell for everybody, all inside one county line.