Course Profiles / Massachusetts

The Country Club Main Course: A Course Profile

In 1913, a 20-year-old amateur named Francis Ouimet, who lived across the street and had caddied at the club, beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a playoff to win the U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline. The win is generally credited with starting the golf boom in America, the moment the game stopped being an import and became a national habit. It happened here, on a course that began as a horse racetrack. There is no more consequential piece of golf ground in the United States, and the club has spent 110 years acting like it knows that and would rather not discuss it.

The Country Club was founded in 1882, before golf was the point, and it was one of the five charter members that founded the USGA in 1894. The first six holes were laid out by members in 1893 on and around the racetrack. Willie Campbell expanded the course to nine and then to 18 by 1899, and William Flynn's hand is in the design lineage as well. The club has three nines now, Clyde, Squirrel, and Primrose, and the Main Course, the championship routing, combines Clyde and Squirrel. That composite habit matters. The course the USGA plays is not quite the course the members play, which is one reason the championship version feels assembled by argument rather than by template.

Seventeen championships

The record is difficult to argue with because it is mostly arithmetic. The Country Club has hosted 17 USGA national championships, more than all but one other club in the country. The U.S. Opens came in 1913, 1963, 1988, and 2022, and three of the four finished in playoffs, which suggests the course has a habit of refusing to separate a field until the very end. Julius Boros won the 1963 playoff. Curtis Strange won in 1988, in a playoff, and then won again the next year at Oak Hill, a double no one had managed since Ben Hogan. Matt Fitzpatrick won in 2022 on the same ground where he had won the U.S. Amateur nine years earlier.

Then there is 1999. The Ryder Cup at Brookline, the United States down 10-6 on Sunday morning, the comeback, Justin Leonard's putt on the 17th, and the argument about what happened on that green that has never entirely stopped. European players and fans still cite Brookline as the week the Ryder Cup's manners broke. The club's own view, characteristically, is that it hosted a famous match. Both things are true, and the tension between them is the most honest summary of this club available. Our Brookline town ranking and the Massachusetts state ranking both start here, and neither ranking is close.

The course itself

Strip away the championships and what remains is old, hard, New England golf: a routing threaded through rock ledges and trees, greens that punish the wrong side, and a premium on the tee shot that modern length has reduced but not removed. Rees Jones led updates for the 1988 Open, the standard championship toughening of that era, and Gil Hanse began a restoration in 2019, part of the long correction away from that era's narrowing instincts. The bones, Campbell's and Flynn's bones, were always good enough. The restorations keep proving it.

The concession, and it is a real one: as a piece of pure architecture, Brookline is a composite, literally and figuratively, and composite courses invite the charge that the whole is a greatest-hits album rather than a single sustained argument. A purist can prefer the coherence of a one-architect, one-vision course. The rebuttal is the playoff record. Courses that produce three playoff Opens in four tries are not accidents of selection. They identify the best player slowly, and they make him earn it on the last three holes.

Access is private in the fullest Brookline sense. There is no application window to describe and no visitor program to game. The realistic way to see the Main Course is the way most Americans have seen it: when the USGA or the PGA of America brings a championship and opens the gates. Until then it sits behind its trees in Norfolk County, older than the governing body it helped found, waiting for the next playoff.