Top 50 Golf Cities in America?

[Sean Leary]

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue is number 6!!   Yikes!  

I know the golf scene there has improved over the last 10 years, but that's crazy talk.

Craig,

See what happens when you move away Its sunny all the time and we have the 6th best golf city in the country.

[John Foley]

You guys are just jealous that your cities we're ranked in the Top 10 .

Come up here to Roch and well show you some great value for you golfing  $'s!!

[Mike_Cirba]

Man is that a sad statement of Philly public golf!

Do they have public golf in Philly? I thought once you paid your local taxes you were automatically swept into some Flynn masterpiece.

Even more reason to fuel the fires for restoring Cobb's Creek...

I see a potential "Perfect Storm" of seemingly unrelated factors that could possibly collude to drive this effort.

I'll explain all on Saturday.  

[Jason Connor]

Having lived in Pittsburgh and Cleveland as an adult, I object to Pittsburgh outranking Cleveland.

Cleveland has city owned courses by Donald Ross and Stanley Thompson, both in great shape and well maintained.  There's also a very affordable Dye course very close.

Pittsburgh has, well when I left for grad school at Carnegie Mellon a friend said "The worst golf course you'll ever play is a city owned course just off campus."  I thought, I've played some terrible tracks.  But he was right ... by a lot.  It seems the vast majority of great tracks in Pittsburgh are private.  Oakmont, Fox Chapel, even Ross's Edgewood.

[Bill Brightly]

Pittsburgh has some nice public courses: North Park and Soth Park are actually very nice.
 
Been 25 years  since I lived there, but I played mostly public course and thought they were good, with good access.

[CHrisB]

Wow, I live in the #1 golf city in America? I find that hard to believe.

Don't get me wrong--I love living in Austin but it is not necessarily because of the golf. The golf is decent and getting better, and if you are a municipal golfer you're doing well--the set of municipal courses is quite good. But it is an annoyingly difficult place for the supers to try to grow good greens, the private clubs are almost all overpriced, and there are practically no courses (public or private) with good practice facilities.

More applicable to this forum, the ODG greats of GCA did very little work here (Perry Maxwell did the old Austin CC but there is practically no Maxwell left, and Tillinghast did a couple of courses down the road in San Antonio). There is a good sampling of courses by many of today's leading architects (Coore/Crenshaw, Pete Dye, Nicklaus, Fazio, Hills, Morrish, etc.) however.

But we do get to play golf year-round, and we get to eat great food and listen to good music afterwards! My favorites are Wolfdancer GC (Hills), Spanish Oaks (Bobby Weed), Austin GC (Crenshaw), Austin CC (Pete Dye), and the best public value for my money is Star Ranch (Bechtol & Russell).

[Matt_Cohn]

Can you imagine what the city government of San Francisco-Oakland-Freemont would be like? Yikes.

Seriously, a city is a city. Come on.

edit: Apparently we have the best golf weather in the country, better even than Los Angeles, Riverside, and presumably San Diego. Wow, these golf.com people know things that I don't even know - and I live here!

meta-edit: I do give golf.com credit for creating these lists though. They choose interesting topics, and they make for good discussion most of the time.