Great Donald Ross Golf Courses Everyone Can Play

Ever wonder what it would be like to play the same golf courses as celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Gary Player, Mark O’Meara, and even Babe Ruth? A celebrity in his own right, Donald Ross created many of the best golf courses ever designed. Here is the definitive collection of golf courses in the United States created by Ross, the most prolific and renowned golf course designer of all time. Paul and B. J. Dunn have collected all the information you need in order to find and play the more than one-hundred public, semi-private, and resort golf courses in the United States, all designed by Ross.

Donald Ross is one of the greatest golf course designers of all time. He was responsible for the creation of hundreds of the most beautiful and challenging courses in the world. In Great Donald Ross Golf Courses You Can Play, Paul and B. J. Dunn have collected scorecards, course descriptions, histories, addresses and directions to courses for over one hundred semi-private, public, and resort golf courses designed by Donald Ross in North America from 1899-1948. Illustrated with over 150 color photographs, this book has everything the die-hard, and even casual, golfer will need to locate and play the golf courses designed by the most prolific and successful golf course designer ever.

In the early 1900s, Overhills emerged as an exclusive hunt club hidden among the longleaf pine and wiregrass forest, sandy roads, and rural solitude of the North Carolina Sandhills. Soon becoming the Overhills Country Club, this rustic retreat featured a clubhouse, horse stables, dog kennels, train station, post office, and a golf course designed by the legendary Donald Ross. At its height, Overhills boasted fox hunting, bird hunting, polo, and golf with personal cottages on the property commissioned by William Averell Harriman and Percy Avery Rockefeller. By the era of the Great Depression, Overhills evolved from a country club to a country estate for the family of Percy and Isabel Rockefeller, lasting well into the latter decades of the 20th century. Throughout its history, the resident employees and tenant farmers of Overhills contributed to a unique community in this private southern arcadia.

a biography of golf course architect Donald Rss

Discovering the life and work of a true artist: Donald Ross I grew up playing a Donald Ross golf course, Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio, so my standards of what a good golf course should be were based on a Ross design. I think being exposed early to a Donald Ross course provided me balance, as both a player and future golf course designer, because of the variety of shots found throughout each of his design. Ross was without a doubt a great influence on my design career, and he remains a personal favorite. I am happy to see Brad Klein devote a book to the work of Donald Ross. Brad is passionate about golf course design and that translates in his writing. --Jack Nicklaus

A masterpiece of architectural literature, "The Links" is the first book that fully addresses the complexities of the golf course in terms of design, construction, and definition of the game. Written in 1926, Robert Hunter conceptualized "The Links" as a complete study, a manual for golf course architects and design enthusiasts, specifically written to advance the field of study in a way that had never been tried before. Although Hunter was not a golf course architect by trade, or even a golfing professional, his background as a dedicated socialist reformer led to his unique understanding of the relationship between golf and its greater contribution to society. The challenges posed by golf, as well as the beauty produced by the singular nature of the world’s most famous links, led Hunter to conclude that diversity is what makes golf the cherished game that it is. In "The Links," he postulates, “It is not the love of something easy which has drawn men like a magnet for hundreds of years to this royal and ancient pastime; on the contrary, it is the maddening difficulty of it.” Supported by over fifty photographs and original drawings, "The Links" details the essential features of an ideal golf course and provides insight into the strategies and methods used to design the world’s most renowned courses. As acclaimed architect Dr. Alister MacKenzie wrote, “I have read "The Links" with the greatest interest. Mr. Hunter is familiar with all the great courses in the world and he has written a most entertaining book, which I am sure every golfer will read with profit. I do not hesitate to say that it is the classic of the subject.”

Many years before his death in 1948, legendary golf course architect Donald Ross wrote a book that was never published. Within the manuscript, Ross offered many of his thoughts on the game that he so dearly loved. In the mid-1990s, the book was miraculously rediscovered and published to great acclaim. Golf Has Never Failed Meis an insightful look at the game by one of its most famous and beloved people. And what may surprise you is that many of the astute observations that he made so long ago still hold true today.