# The Best Tom Bendelow Golf Courses in America Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-tom-bendelow-golf-courses-in-america/ [The Course Rankings](/) Architect Rankings A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Tom Bendelow was golf's Johnny Appleseed, the man who planted the game across America one quickly built course at a time, and posterity has punished him for the speed. Thirty six of his courses sit in our dataset across 18 states, from Colorado to Rhode Island, and the pattern in the list tells his story better than any biography: he worked everywhere, early, often for clubs that later hired more famous names to rebuild what he started. Donald Ross reworked his courses. Rees Jones reworked them. Tom Doak renovated one. Ranking Bendelow is therefore an exercise in credit. Where does the seed planter rank when the garden was replanted by masters? Higher than the tour books usually put him, because two of the most famous addresses in American golf started as Bendelow ground. His Louisville and Florida footprints show up in our [Louisville ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-louisville-ky/) and [Orlando ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-orlando-fl/), and his Kansas work anchors the [Mission Hills page](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-mission-hills-ks/). ## 1Course No. 3, Medinah Country Club Bendelow completed Course No. 3 at Medinah in 1928, the third of his three courses at a club established in 1924, and it became a major championship machine: three U.S. Opens in 1949, 1975 and 1990, two PGA Championships in 1999 and 2006, both won by Tiger Woods, the 2012 Ryder Cup and its Miracle at Medinah European comeback, and the 2026 Presidents Cup. Before the recent renovation it played par 72 at 7,657 yards with a 78.3 rating, its famous par 3 17th over Lake Kadijah the signature. OCM Golf's renovation, led by Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead and completed in 2024, widened fairways, enlarged greens and removed hundreds of trees. The renovation debate is the Bendelow debate in miniature: the routing and the ground are his, the presentation keeps being rewritten by the best hands of each era, and the championships keep coming to the same address. ## 2East Lake Golf Club Golf at East Lake dates to 1908, and the first architect was Bendelow. Donald Ross reworked it in 1913, Rees Jones restored and rebuilt it in 1994, and the club became the home course of Bobby Jones, who grew up playing it, the permanent home of the TOUR Championship since 2004, host of the 1963 Ryder Cup and the 2001 U.S. Amateur, and the engine of the East Lake neighborhood revival under Tom Cousins. Jones's home course, the FedEx Cup's permanent stage: the seed was planted in 1908, and the man who planted it gets his share of the credit here, ranked second only because Medinah's major count is heavier. ## 3Course No. 1, Medinah Country Club The connoisseur's Medinah. Bendelow's original course at the club from 1925, renovated by Tom Doak in 2014 in his first Chicago area renovation, with Doak restoring Bendelow character through new bunkering and greens. Shorter and more strategic than No. 3, ranked in Golf Digest's Illinois top 15, and the rare case of a modern master treating Bendelow's work as worth recovering rather than replacing. If No. 3 is the stadium, No. 1 is the argument that the seed planter could design, not just plant. ## 4Audubon Country Club Louisville, 1908, Bendelow in the Audubon neighborhood: par 72 at about 6,720 yards from the championship tees, zoysia fairways and bentgrass greens. Audubon has hosted the Kentucky Amateur 12 times, the most of any club, including in 2021, plus three Kentucky Opens, and Golfweek ranks it consistently among the top five private courses in Kentucky. Lester George led a comprehensive restoration and bunker redesign begun in 2019, a 1.7 million dollar project, which places Audubon in the happy category of Bendelow courses being restored rather than erased. ## 5Palma Ceia Golf & Country Club Tampa's oldest private club, golf dating to 1916 with Bendelow and later Ross era work in South Tampa's Palma Ceia neighborhood. Its claim is a tournament: the Gasparilla Invitational, a top mid amateur event, hosted here since 1932, a run of serious amateur golf longer than most clubs' entire histories. Classic in town parkland, private, in the highest estimate tier of Tampa golf costs. Bendelow and Ross sharing one small city property is the Florida version of his whole career. ## 6Country Club of Orlando Founded in 1911, among Orlando's oldest clubs, with Bendelow in its roots and Donald Ross contributing design work in the 1920s, restored under Ron Forse in work completed in the late 2010s. Classic in town parkland near downtown Orlando and a host of Florida State Golf Association championships. It pairs with Palma Ceia as evidence that Florida's oldest private golf runs through Bendelow's survey work before it runs through anyone else's. ## 7Dubsdread Golf Course The Bendelow the public can play, and the name alone earns its place. Orlando's historic municipal course, opened in 1924, its name derived from the intent to instill dread in dubs, or novice golfers, the same joke Cog Hill later made famous in Chicago. Par 70 at 6,153 yards, host of the Orlando Open on the early PGA Tour, renovated by Mike Dasher in 2008, with its Tap Room restaurant a local institution. Municipal access to a 1924 Bendelow in the middle of Orlando is the democrat's entry on a list full of private gates. ## 8Mission Hills Country Club Kansas, 1914, founded June 30 of that year through developer J. C. Nichols, who built the club to help sell homes in his planned Mission Hills community. The Bendelow original ran along Brush Creek across 121 acres in Kansas and 7 in Missouri, the clubhouse placed on the Missouri side because of laxer liquor laws there, a detail that tells you everything about 1914. Keith Foster remodeled the course for 2007; it plays par 70 at 6,310 yards. Nichols also founded the adjoining Community Golf Club, later Indian Hills, which makes this Bendelow the seed of an entire golf neighborhood. The concession, and it is the honest one: much of what Bendelow built was built fast, for a young game's first demand, and a fair amount of it was ordinary work that later architects improved past recognition. He is overrated when every Bendelow attribution gets treated as a lost masterpiece. He is underrated, badly, when Medinah and East Lake get discussed as if the ground chose its first architect by accident. It did not. It chose the man who was planting golf everywhere, and two of his plantings became cathedrals. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.