Fried Egg Favorites: Michigan Golf

When you think of golf destination states, the first few that come to mind are Florida, Arizona, California, and the Carolinas. Due to its many quality public and semi-private options, Michigan deserves to be in the conversation as well. 

With the PGA Tour’s Rocket Mortgage Classic this week at Detroit Golf Club, here are some of our favorite offerings highlighting what Michigan golf has to offer.

Bang for Your Buck: Michigan

Check out our guide to affordable and architecturally interesting golf courses in Michigan featuring courses designed by Donald Ross, Tom Doak and Renaissance Golf, Langford & Moreau, Mike DeVries, and many more.

Eggsplorations: Grand Rapids

We’re particularly fond of the Grand Rapids area, which offers four courses within an hour of the city that will fill your cup without breaking the bank.

We have curated trips for Northern Michigan and Forest Dunes, specifically, and have also highlighted Wolf River Golf Park, which Andy Johnson calls one of the best values in public golf.

Podcasts

Yolk with Doak 11: Michigan Golf

In the early days of our Yolk with Doak podcast interviews, Tom Doak and his Renaissance Golf Design associate Don Placek joined Andy to talk about their favorite courses in Michigan. Listen on Apple or Spotify. 

Superintendent Series: Jordan Caplan on Belvedere and Michigan Golf

Belvedere Golf Club superintendent Jordan Caplan joins the podcast to talk about the Willie Watson course and his role as the club's fourth superintendent in its almost 100-year history. Jordan and Andy Johnson discuss the challenges of course maintenance in harsh  Michigan winters and the differences between the Belvedere job and Jordan’s past work at Philadelphia Cricket Club. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

Golf Course Renovation on a Budget with Steven Biehl

Andy Johnson is joined by Steven Biehl, superintendent at Wolf River Golf Park in Bear Lake, Michigan. Steven led a full renovation of this course that cost just $150,000 and discusses the challenges of renovating on a tight budget. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

Flashlight on a Detroit public treasure

Andy Johnson ended this July 2020 Shotgun Start episode with a Flashback Friday segment on the origins of Rackham Golf Course and its history and significance in the Detroit golf scene. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

Course Profiles

If you want to learn more, check out our nine profiles that put some of Michigan’s best golf courses in the spotlight. 

Belvedere Golf Club

Visiting Belvedere Golf Club feels like stepping back in time. This semi-private treasure in Charlevoix, Michigan, provides something rare for American golfers: regular access to one of the finest examples of a Golden Age architect’s work. 

Diamond Springs Golf Course

After co-designing Pilgrim’s Run Golf Club in Pierson, Michigan, and serving briefly as the course’s superintendent, Kris Shumaker took a crack at developing his own mom-and-pop golf property. From the beginning, Shumaker’s goal was to build an excellent course that anyone could afford to play. Along with a few investors, he purchased a rural site near the small town of Hamilton and created a routing. He then called in Mike DeVries, the architect he had collaborated with at Pilgrim’s Run, to fine-tune the design and shape the bunkers and greens. To promote ease of maintenance, Shumaker established just two heights of cut: one for the greens, and one for all other playing areas. Twenty-two years after opening, Diamond Springs remains one of the truest examples of modern architectural minimalism in American golf.

Kingsley Club

Minutes south of Traverse City, Michigan, sits one of the country’s finest modern golf courses. Kingsley Club was architect Mike DeVries’s second solo project and served as a springboard for his future work in his home state of Michigan and across the world. At Kingsley, you will find a majestic Northern Michigan landscape, intricate greens, and a wonderfully laid-back atmosphere.

Lost Dunes Golf Club

Set just 500 yards from Lake Michigan along the same dune ridge of Mike Keiser’s Dunes Club, Lost Dunes Golf Club repurposed a flat-bottomed-abandoned sand quarry with visually stimulating bunkering and what Tom Doak refers to as “the most undulating set of greens I’ve ever built.” While the course occupies a serene setting with towering dunes, large lakes, and mature trees, it is also bisected by Interstate 94, similar to Oakmont and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. This bisection, along with swaths of environmental restrictions, created a routing nightmare for Doak to solve. Despite the multitude of hurdles, the sandy soils and creativity of Doak and his novice shapers created a unique golf course that’s highly playable off the tee and mentally invigorating (or perhaps infuriating) on the green.

Marquette Golf Club (Greywalls)

Marquette Golf Club has long served as the main golf facility for Marquette, one of the biggest towns on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (pop: 20,394). By the early 2000s, its existing course was overrun by players, so the club decided to add a second 18-hole course designed by up-and-coming Michigan architect Mike DeVries. Fresh off of building Kingsley Club, DeVries took an extreme site, wooded and littered with granite rock outcroppings, and built Greywalls, one of the country’s most memorable golf courses. The visually arresting course offers a handful of unforgettable shots and features premiere playing conditions with fescue-bluegrass fairways.

Meadowbrook Country Club

The initial growth of the U.S. automotive industry happened to coincide with the Golden Age of American golf architecture. As a result, Detroit—where a large portion of the country’s cars were manufactured—became a hotspot for interesting golf course design. Meadowbrook Country Club, located in Northville Township, was a product of this busy period. Originally a six-hole course laid out by famed Scottish player and architect Willie Park Jr., Meadowbrook expanded to a full 18 in 1921 under the watch of regional designers Harry Collis and Jack Daray, and received some touch-ups in the early 30s by Donald Ross. It went on to host the 1955 PGA Championship, won by Doug Ford. In terms of design quality, however, Meadowbrook was overshadowed by its suburban neighbors. So in 2017, the club hired Andy Staples to bring in some fresh ideas. Staples’s Willie Park-inspired renovation was one of the boldest golf architecture projects of the 2010s, and Meadowbrook now looks, feels, and plays like nothing else in the region.

Oakland Hills Country Club (South)

One of the premier clubs in the American Midwest, Oakland Hills Country Club has hosted nine major championships and is slated for two U.S. Opens (2034 and 2051) and U.S. Women’s Opens (2031 and 2042). The club got started when its founder, Joe Mack, and a group of other members discovered an ideal golf property in 1916 and quickly hired Donald Ross. It’s believed that Ross was hired because of his ongoing construction work at Detroit Golf Club, where he was building 36 holes at the time and where Mack was a member. Ross was immediately enamored with the Oakland Hills site, saying, “The lord intended for this to be a golf course.” His South Course, completed in 1918, hosted the 1922 Western Open and two U.S. Opens before Robert Trent Jones’s landmark 1951 redesign. Jones’s work, spurred by concerns of low scoring at the 1937 U.S. Open, created the course that Ben Hogan dubbed “The Monster” and that established Jones as “The Open Doctor.” The Monster remained intact for seven decades before Gil Hanse was commissioned to restore Ross’s design in 2019. While this restoration was not met with unanimous praise within the club, it helped the South Course at Oakland Hills return to the ranks of the best golf courses in the country.

Pilgrim’s Run Golf Club

In the early 1990s, Robert Van Kampen set out to build a golf course with the help of six of his employees, two of whom were his sons-in-law. Each person designed three holes. The drawings were given to former golf course superintendent Kris Shumaker, and the build began. A young architect, Mike DeVries, was brought onto the team a year into construction, and together DeVries and Shumaker executed the group’s vision (with some adjustments made in the field). With so many minds involved in designing the holes at Pilgrim’s Run Golf Club, the course could have easily gone off the rails if it weren’t for the skilled guides in DeVries and Shumaker. The course winds its way through a Michigan forest, a routing that was laid out by Shumaker but shaped by DeVries. They took full advantage of the beautiful land, highlighting ridges and landforms that were once covered in trees.

The Dunes Club

Tucked away in the forested sand dunes of New Buffalo, Michigan, the Dunes Club is Mike Keiser’s first golf development, created a decade before Bandon Dunes opened. Dick Nugent designed the original nine, and over the past several years Jim Urbina has revised some greens. The Dunes Club intentionally invokes the visuals of Pine Valley, albeit on a smaller scale. The relaxed ambiance, coupled with a focus on pure golf, make for a first-rate experience.