The Yale Golf Course

Great courses produce great players: this was the belief, now somewhat old-fashioned, that motivated the construction of the Yale Golf Course. In the early 1920s, after winning 13 of the first 20 national golf championships, the Yale golf team had gone seven years without winning one. Meanwhile, rival universities Harvard and Princeton had built up-to-date golf facilities. In response, Yale created what is now considered the greatest college course in the United States.

In 1923, Sarah Wey Tompkins, widow of Yale alum Ray Tompkins, sold a 720-acre tract of forest to the university. Yale renamed the property the Ray Tompkins Memorial, set aside a portion of it for a championship course, and persuaded America’s preeminent golf architect, C.B. Macdonald, to visit the site. Macdonald had mostly retired from the design business, so his protégé Seth Raynor took the lead in laying out and building the course. The land, while beautiful, posed many challenges; it was rocky, densely wooded, and full of sudden elevation changes. Macdonald later referred to the property as “a veritable wilderness.” With steam shovels, dynamite, and a budget of nearly $450,000 — one of the largest sums spent on a golf course to that point in history — Raynor, along with his associate Charles Banks, reshaped the land into 18 dramatic golf holes. Raynor included several of his customary templates (“Road,” “Short,” “Cape,” “Biarritz,” “Alps,” “Redan,” “Valley,” and “Eden”) but also a number of original designs, such as the hurly-burly 10th (“Carries”) and 18th (“Home”). Perhaps, given the severity and uniqueness of the topography, Raynor found his tried-and-true “ideal holes” less useful than usual. The wild terrain seems to have forced the architect to come up with new ideas.

For much of the 20th century, the university neglected the course. An ill-conceived renovation by Robert Rulewich in the 1990s further eroded the character of Raynor’s design. Superintendent Scott Ramsay oversaw many improvements in the 00s and 10s — including tree management, green expansions, and drainage upgrades — but as soon as he left in early 2020, the course regressed. Following an outcry from alumni, Yale approved a historical renovation by Gil Hanse. This project broke ground in early 2024 and is expected to conclude in spring or summer 2026.

Take Note…

Return of the Mac? Sometimes C.B. Macdonald is named as the sole architect of the Yale Golf Course; other times, as co-designer alongside Seth Raynor. The reality seems to be that his role was quite limited. He fielded the university’s initial overture in 1923 and served on an advisory committee for the project, but according to the Yale golf program’s own well-researched history, “There is no evidence that [Macdonald] visited the construction site or saw the course after it opened on April 15, 1926.” For this reason, I believe Seth Raynor deserves the lead credit for the design of the course.

Horse Hill. During the construction of the seventh hole, a horse died while dragging a plow up the hill where the green now sits. The crew simply buried the poor beast under the putting surface.

Mutombo Hill. The upslope between the tee and the fairway on the 17th hole was once an exposed rock face, but hickory-using players soon grew tired of drives bouncing back toward them. The university eventually decided to cover the ledge in topsoil.

The original golf gnomes. In the 1970s, the daughter of then-superintendent Harry Meusel, carved several elfish figures out of tree stumps throughout the golf course. Only one of these novelties, a likeness of a German leprechaun to the right of the 14th fairway, remains today.

(Note: Matt Rouches contributed the latter three entries in this section.)

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