For genuinely rugged, minimal, of-the-place golf in the Sandhills of Nebraska, play one (or all) of these nine-hole courses. They are true Midwestern links, built close to their towns on ultra-low budgets, and enjoyed and embraced by locals.

Oddly, the first Bandon Dunes course may be the most underrated. Pacific Dunes, Bandon Trails, Old Macdonald, and Sheep Ranch are more radical than David McLay Kidd's sturdy 1999 design, but only Pacific has a decidedly stronger collection of holes, and none has better topography.

One of the great discoveries in recent golf architecture is that short courses can play by their own rules and go places that 18-hole par-72 courses wouldn't dream of. Consider the property that Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw's Bandon Preserve occupies. The terrain is too severe for par 4s and 5s, but 13 par 3s, ranging from 63 to 150 yards, fit perfectly.

More than any course I've played, Bandon Trails is about the land it occupies. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw's routing explores the big, varied property in stages. The first two holes bound up and over a dunescape; the next three move through a meadow; Nos. 6-13 climb into a dense forest; and No. 14 plummets back into the meadow.

Belvedere is a private club that allows public play seven days a week. Set on a tract of Northern Michigan farmland in idyllic Charlevoix, this William Watson design would be the perfect home course: laid-back, fun, and skillfully designed.

Perhaps the most storied American muni, Bethpage Black occupies a wonderful piece of land, and its routing is pure magic. Architects A.W. Tillinghast and Joseph H. Burbeck maximized the site's interest by placing greens on ridges and letting the fairways swoop through the valleys in a variety of ways.

The second best course at Bethpage State Park might actually be the better model for municipal golf, as the Red is the one you'll actually want to play every day. Just like its bigger, harder brother, the Red is said to be the work of A. W. Tillinghast.

Originally designed in 1929 by George Hanson, Brown Deer Golf Course was a charming place to play golf. The course stood as the longtime home to the PGA Tour’s Greater Milwaukee Open. Brown Deer was one of the country’s finest municipal golf courses but lost its way with extensive tree planting in the 1950s and an early 90’s redesign from Andy North and Roger Packard. The redesign focused on modernizing Brown Deer for the aerial nature of the PGA Tour. These changes cost Brown Deer in the playability and charm department. The course still remains a great public option and a great restoration candidate now that the course’s dreams of PGA Tour golf are long gone.

Cape Cod Country Club opened in 1928 and was designed by Devereux Emmet and Alfred Tull. All of its original corridors are intact, and it is routed beautifully on dramatic, pondside land. Among its most memorable features are a volcano green, a Great Hazard, jagged strings of bunkers, and big dips and hollows.

At Chambers Bay, the RTJ II team transformed a degraded quarry into a grand arena for both municipal and championship golf. Cleverly, chief design officer Bruce Charlton and then-associate Jay Blasi retained some artifacts of the site's industrial past, including the immense concrete dividers along the 18th fairway.

This Mike DeVries design an hour outside of Grand Rapids is a model for affordable public golf. The land is good but not extraordinary—most communities have something like it. On the flatter stretches, DeVries uses bold green complexes to create interest.

Once part of Essex County Country Club, now property of the Essex County Parks Department, this Charles "Steam Shovel" Banks course starts at the bottom of a steep hill with a Road Hole. Featuring Banks's bold renditions of C. B. Macdonald's "ideal holes" along with a few originals, this municipal course stands toe-to-toe architecturally with the area's best private clubs.

CommonGround Golf Course, built by Renaissance Golf Design in 2009, is all about its community. That vision is especially clear in the playability of the course. The fairways are generous for the average golfer, and there is plenty of room to bounce the ball into the large greens.

George Wright was conceived in the late 1920s as a private club designed by Donald Ross. The Depression, however, put an end to its construction. The City of Boston then acquired the land and spent $1 million—a massive sum for the time—to build the course with Works Progress Administration labor.

About as far north as you can venture in America is one of the best public golf courses in the country. Greywalls, a Mike DeVries design on the edge of the Canadian Shield, is the closest thing to a modern Yale Golf Course in existence. The routing navigates rock outcroppings and rough ground before traveling through a sand-laden stretch in the middle of the back nine.

Prior to Troy Miller's renovation of "The Muni," Charleston-area public golf offered little in the way of compelling architecture. Now residents have access to an affordable course featuring bold interpretations of Seth Raynor templates found at Charleston's top two private clubs, Country Club of Charleston and Yeamans Hall.

Most golf course architects worth their salt have heard of Kankakee Elks, and many have gone far out of their way to see it. Why? It's one of the most enticing restoration opportunities left in the United States. Just over an hour south of downtown Chicago, Kankakee boasts the best set of Langford & Moreau greens I've seen.

Lawsonia Links is the crown jewel of William Langford and Theodore Moreau's body of work—and you can play it for less than $100. Few architects had a style as interesting as that of Langford & Moreau. Using their mastery of the steam shovel, a late-Golden Age earthmoving tool, the duo created highly distinctive, often massive greens and hazards.

The Woodlands Course isn’t the Links, but it’s an enjoyable place to play golf. A friend of mine put it best when he said that if he was given ten rounds, he’d split them 8-2 between the two courses, but that’s more a representation of the Links’s greatness. The Woodlands is a fine course, but I would only play it if you are spending multiple days at Lawsonia.

This semi-private Donald Ross design in the Philly suburbs is a gem. Built in the early years of Ross's career, LuLu is packed with quirky and memorable holes: the par-3 3rd, which plays over a quarry to a volcano green, and the par-4 8th, which has a punchbowl green and numerous chocolate drops.

The second course at Sand Valley Golf Resort pushes the limits of width. By offering gargantuan fairways, architect David McLay Kidd ensures that golfers of all skill levels will spend little time searching for lost balls.

Cleveland Metroparks has two absolute gems. One of them, Stanley Thompson's Sleepy Hollow, we've already profiled for this series. The other, Manakiki Golf Course, began its life in 1929 as a Donald Ross design called Willowick Country Club.

In many cases, amateur golf architecture goes poorly. But Champion Hill, set in the rolling sand dunes of Northern Michigan, is an outlier. Lee Stone's homemade course is a tremendous example of what actual minimalism looks like.

Admittedly, the nine-hole Northwood Golf Club, built in 1928 by Alister MacKenzie and Robert Hunter, has lost a bit of polish over the years. While some lovely green shapes and contours remain (especially on Nos. 2, 4, 7, and 8), a few holes lack their original bunkering and strategy.

For the fourth 18-hole course at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, developer Mike Keiser wanted to build a replica of the Lido Golf Club, the C. B. Macdonald masterpiece that closed during World War II. But the concept didn't fit the site, so Tom Doak and co-designer Jim Urbina opted for a looser tribute to Macdonald.

In describing his design at Mammoth Dunes, David McLay Kidd recalled a group of golfers telling him that "they were completely bemused" while playing the course. That's exactly how I would characterize the experience of walking Tom Doak's routing at Pacific Dunes.

For most of the public, the template holes of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor are inaccessible, hidden behind the gates of private clubs. So when architect David Esler was hired to renovate the municipal Mt. Prospect Golf Club in Chicago's northern suburbs, he set out to make the Macdonald-Raynor style of design available to the masses.

The back nine, however, absolutely is. The dunes and the ocean views get a lot of attention, as they should, but what really makes the nine work is Jack Neville's ingenious routing. Each hole reveals a new vista or a new section of the property. Multiple greens and tees make use of the most dramatic family of dunes.

Pasatiempo is the work of a great architect at the height of his powers. The terrain is severe, but Alister MacKenzie's routing cleverly spaces out the uphill walks. The bunkers, built under the supervision of associate Robert Hunter, are among the most striking of MacKenzie's career.

Paxon Hollow has seen many changes since it opened in 1926. The most recent have come at the hands of local resident Jim Wagner, Gil Hanse's design partner, who has spent years brushing up this Philly gem.

Let's get the critiques out of the way. Yes, resort development has impinged on several holes—including, sadly, the all-world 18th. Yes, a few of the inland holes have lost their sense of the natural landscape. And yes, the greens have shrunk over the years, erasing some fun pin positions. But make no mistake, Pebble Beach Golf Links is the definition of a must-see.

For genuinely rugged, minimal, of-the-place golf in the Sandhills of Nebraska, play one (or all) of these nine-hole courses. They are true Midwestern links, built close to their towns on ultra-low budgets, and enjoyed and embraced by locals.

Tucked into a forest in central Michigan, Pilgrim's Run is another example of an outstanding Mike DeVries design offered at an affordable rate. While you're engulfed by pines on every hole, DeVries uses corridors wide enough to give you a sense of comfort.

In 2022, this 93-year-old Donald Ross course will host the U.S. Women's Open for the second time. Whereas its sister course Mid Pines is compact and intimate, Pine Needles sprawls across a fine Carolina Sandhills property.

An absolute must-see in the Carolina Sandhills, Mid Pines is, as consulting architect Kyle Franz describes it, "pure romance." Donald Ross packed this design onto a small site, and the course ducks and dives in and out of the corners of the property, regularly returning to key ridges or hollows.

One of the crown jewels of Donald Ross's résumé, Pinehurst No. 2 is among the finest public golf experiences in the world. Famed for its championship difficulty, No. 2 is actually one of the rare U.S. Open venues that can bring handicap golfers and elite players closer together.

The best option for public golf in the Chicago area is this former country club south of the city. Credited to Donald Ross, Ravisloe also saw work from William Watson, Langford & Moreau, and most recently David Esler, who did a restoration in the early 2000s.

The most interesting short courses push the boundaries of golf architecture. Some explore sites too extreme to accommodate par 4s and 5s; others experiment with concepts that would seem gimmicky elsewhere. At their best, short courses open golfers' minds to how fun unconventional design can be. That's exactly what McVeigh's Gauntlet does for guests at Silvies Valley Ranch.

2019 was a great year for the NY/NJ public golf scene, as Rock Spring Golf Club, a 1925 Seth Raynor design that has gone through troubled times, re-opened for public play. Set on top of the first big rise west of New York City and offering stellar skyline views, the course features a number of the classic MacRaynor templates.

There are few places in the U.S. where the everyday golfer can see the work of Stanley Thompson, Canada's greatest golf architect. One of those places is Sleepy Hollow, the prized possession of Cleveland Metroparks.

Understandably, much of the press around Silvies Valley Ranch has focused on reversibility. Like the Loop at Forest Dunes, Silvies plays in different directions on alternate days. In order to make this reversible concept work on a hilly Eastern Oregon site, architect Dan Hixson built 27 greens.

Soule Park shows how excellent architecture can coexist with a cheap green fee and a casual atmosphere. After a catastrophic flood in 2005, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner resurrected and reimagined (without rerouting) this Billy Bell Jr. design on a small budget.

The latest addition to the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is Sheep Ranch, set to open on June 1. For the better part of two decades, the property housed a Tom Doak design with 13 greens and no formal routing or teeing grounds. Now Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have converted Sheep Ranch into an 18-hole course.

Built on what might be the most dramatic land in the Carolina Sandhills, Southern Pines is the best value in the Pinehurst area. Its Donald Ross design has seen some renovations over the years, and many of the original greens are gone.

For $20 on a Saturday morning, golfers can play an almost untouched Langford & Moreau design. Spring Valley sits on a rolling property and has the unmistakable bold shaping of the famed Midwest architectural firm.

As an example of Robert Trent Jones's mid-century architecture, Spyglass Hill is tough to beat. It's a big, beautiful property with big, impressive golf holes. The opener is the biggest of all, plunging from the Del Monte Forest to the seaside dunes.

The making of Stoatin Brae was a unique experiment: Renaissance Golf Design's associates Brian Schneider, Eric Iverson, Don Placek, and Brian Slawnik (with the help of Blake Conant) designed the course without input from lead architect Tom Doak.

Built on the former site of the famed Santa Anita race tracks, Santa Anita Golf Course was a WPA project, finished in 1935. The architect was little-known James Harrison (J.H.) Smith, who dealt with the flat race track by pushing a whole lot of dirt around.

While the green fee is steep, the turf slow, and the pace of play slower, Whistling Straits is still a marvelous golf course to study. Pete Dye took a barren bluff overlooking Lake Michigan and transformed it through massive earthmoving into a rugged, "links-style" property.

The most recent addition to this Central Florida golf resort required the most architectural inventiveness. About half of the site for the Black Course is sandy and the other half is a flat swamp, so Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner had to manufacture interest on much of the course.

The first course at Sand Valley Golf Resort, designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, set a high bar for the burgeoning Midwest destination. For architecture fans, this course is a treat for the senses. Coore & Crenshaw's mastery of routing is on full display: they find remarkable natural green sites, both set into and on top of the modest sand dunes.

The construction of the first 36 holes at Streamsong is one of the most interesting stories in modern golf architecture. The firms of Coore & Crenshaw and Renaissance Golf Design worked together to squeeze two 18s holes into a small but spectacular site.

For most of its 18 holes, the Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw-designed Streamsong Red loops around Tom Doak's Blue Course. While Doak got the better plot all around, Coore & Crenshaw had plenty of great ground to work with, including sand dunes formed by a past mining operation.

Another New Jersey private-gone-public, A. W. Tillinghast's Suneagles has some of his steepest greens. Just 50 minutes south of Manhattan, the course boasts huge tiers dividing its undulating putting surfaces and big, wing-like contours defending against the short side.

Minimalism has become a troubled concept in recent years. Initially used to describe Tom Doak's and Coore & Crenshaw's efforts to alter the natural landscape as little as possible, it has become a catch-all term for the current era of design. The fact is, though, that very few 21st-century courses have been built in a truly minimalist fashion. That's one reason why Rustic Canyon is so important.

From unknown and on the brink of closing to the darling of the golf internet, Sweetens Cove has had quite the journey. In 2011, the nine-holer formerly known as Sequatchie Valley Golf and Country Club underwent a full transformation at the hands of Tad King and Rob Collins.

About 20 minutes up the road from the much-praised Sweetens Cove, the Course at Sewanee should not be skipped on a golf trip to Chattanooga. Gil Hanse built this nine-holer around the same time Tad King and Rob Collins were transforming the old Sequatchie Valley Golf and Country Club, and it offers a pleasing contrast to its neighbor.

Many people point to Tom Doak and Bill Coore as the pioneers of modern minimalism in golf course architecture. While their projects at High Pointe and Sand Hills were higher profile, Mike Young's The Fields came before either of them. In 1986, after years of selling maintenance equipment, Young used one D5 bulldozer to build this wide, strategic golf course with wonderful greens.

One of the most impressive designs of the modern era, The Loop, Tom Doak's reversible course at Forest Dunes, features 18 greens that serve two distinct 18-hole routings. The Red Course runs counter-clockwise and the Black Course clockwise.

Minutes from downtown Grand Rapids, The Mines is a stellar example of a high-quality course on a difficult site. Power lines and a road divide the property into three sections, creating a few big gaps between holes.

This stunner on the Atlantic Ocean might be the toughest course in America, but layered into the difficulty is Pete Dye's imagination and strategic brilliance. The Ocean Course is far from just a slog. There are many stand-out holes—including the short par-4 3rd and the exacting yet subtle 14th.

DIY golf course architecture doesn't always turn out well. Rarely do amateur designers have the skill to execute their ideas, even if they have the creativity to think them up. So when Jim McNair decided in the 1990s to carry out an in-house renovation of his family's course, The Aiken Golf Club, he was taking a big risk.

While it charges a steep green fee, the River at Blackwolf Run gives golfers a great look at some (relatively) understated Pete Dye architecture. Much of the routing meanders quietly along the body of water that gives the course its name.

With 17 imaginative greens, the Sandbox is packed with fun. Designed by Coore & Crenshaw and built by longtime C&C associate Jim Craig, this par-3 course squeezes as many thrills as possible out of a small plot of land.

Swope Memorial in Kansas City is a rarity: a true municipal golf course designed by one of the six architects in the World Golf Hall of Fame. Built by A.W. Tillinghast in 1934, Swope sits on a rollicking piece of ground, its fairways draped across side slopes and most of its greens situated on ridges.

For genuinely rugged, minimal, of-the-place golf in the Sandhills of Nebraska, play one (or all) of these nine-hole courses. They are true Midwestern links, built close to their towns on ultra-low budgets, and enjoyed and embraced by locals.

There were a lot of factors working against architects Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns when they took on the redesign of Winter Park. The nine-hole site is flat, small, and divided by roads in four places. But Rhebb and Johns knew just what to do within these constraints, installing wall-to-wall short grass, distinctive bunkering, and intricate push-up greens.

If you're planning a golf trip to western Nebraska, you have to include Wild Horse on your itinerary. Built by Dave Axland and Dan Proctor shortly after they finished helping Coore & Crenshaw at Sand Hills, Wild Horse epitomizes affordable, accessible, interesting golf architecture.

How many Coore & Crenshaw-designed golf courses can you play for under $60 every day? As far as I know, there's only one: the Warren Golf Course at Notre Dame. This is a relatively early entry in the Coore & Crenshaw canon, built in 1999, and it has aged beautifully.

The best of Mike Stranz's accessible architecture can be found in the Carolina Sandhills at Tobacco Road. The design is brash, filled with blind shots that evoke a sense of adventure and ask golfers to check notions of "fair" at the door.

While Thendara showcases narrow, peaceful "mountain golf" for its final nine, you will most remember the bold, open front nine by Donald Ross. Designed in 1921, and completed by Ross's associate Walter Hatch, these nine holes feature adventurous greens and slopes.

Golf enthusiasts frequently drive past this little nine-holer on their way down Point Road to Kittansett Golf Club. Designed by George Thomas (of Riviera and LACC fame) in 1904, Marion offers a glimpse into the origins of golf course design in America.