Course Profiles / Kansas
The Topeka Country Club: A Course Profile
In 1967, at an exhibition in Topeka, a 17-year-old Tom Watson met Jack Nicklaus for the first time. Nicklaus later said that if he could replay one round of golf from his life, it would be that one. This is the kind of thing that happens at The Topeka Country Club, a private course in the Kansas capital that has been collecting improbable footnotes since 1905 and keeps them the way it keeps everything else: quietly, and in very good condition.
The club was founded on April 25, 1905, when 226 stockholders bought the Guilford Dudley Estate, with plans for the club dating to 1899. Thomas Bendelow designed the first nine holes, which opened in 1906 at 2,900 yards. Bendelow laid out courses all over America in those years, often in a day, and his Topeka nine was the seed. What grew from it is considerably more serious. In 1936 the club hired Perry Maxwell to redesign Bendelow's nine and lay out a second, and Maxwell's full 18 was completed in early 1940.
Maxwell's greens, still the argument
Perry Maxwell's reputation rests on his greens, the rolling, internally contoured putting surfaces golfers call Maxwell rolls, and Topeka kept his. Ron Whitten, who knows Kansas golf as well as anyone alive, has said he does not know a more challenging set of greens in Kansas. That is the course in one sentence. The routing is a capital-city parkland 18, pleasant to walk and easy to underestimate, and then you reach the greens and the round changes character. Putts that look like ten feet of borrow play fourteen. Chips that land where you aimed finish somewhere you did not discuss.
The visitor list gives you the club's place in its city's life: President William H. Taft played the era's social golf circuit, Ben Hogan and Bob Hope came through, and the club's Woodland Room honors Topeka native Gary Woodland, the city's modern tour standard-bearer and a U.S. Open champion. A club in a state capital either becomes a political-social institution with a golf course attached or a golf club that happens to host the capital. Topeka, on the evidence of its greens, chose the golf. In our Topeka town ranking it stands alone at the top, and the Kansas state ranking has to weigh its Maxwell pedigree against bigger, louder competition from Prairie Dunes down the road.
The 2023 renovation
For more than eighty years, remarkably, almost nothing changed. Then the club spent $4.5 million on a renovation by Todd Clark and Ron Whitten that finished in 2023, the first major course work since 1940, and removed more than 400 trees. Tree removal is the least glamorous sentence in modern course restoration and usually the most important. Eighty years of growth had narrowed Maxwell's playing corridors and shaded his greens; the renovation gave the 1940 course its air back. The risk in any project like this is sanding down the character that made the course worth saving. By the accounts the club values most, the greens, still the hardest set in Kansas, survived intact.
The concession: Topeka is now the only private club in the state capital, which flatters its standing by default, and a Maxwell connoisseur will note this is a redesign layered over Bendelow rather than a from-scratch Maxwell like Prairie Dunes or Southern Hills. The canvas is smaller and the fame is thinner. Both true.
Neither changes the essential fact. A 17-year-old Watson met Nicklaus here, Nicklaus remembered the round for sixty years, and the greens that tested them both are still the hardest in the state. State capitals usually get a course that reflects the politics. Topeka got Perry Maxwell instead.