Golf ball sits on the fairway
It's time to climb up on my soapbox and claim that there's no better golf city in North America than Toronto. I'm thinking of courses within an hour's drive of the city centre, so make that the GTA - Greater Toronto Area. I've seen or played most of the courses in and around the major cities in the U.S. and Canada, and I'm confident in making this assertion.
I'm prompted to these thoughts because the Canadian Men's Mid-Amateur Championship is on this week at the Coppinwood Golf Club in Uxbridge. Tom Fazio designed this relatively new course that's had its ups and down when it comes to its financial stability. But Kevin Thistle, the managerial whiz kid who ran the Angus Glen Golf Club in Markham, took over the private club. Coppinwood is doing much better, and it's a very good course. It's full of attractive and challenging holes, and it's hard to beat the stretch from the 11th through the 17th holes. The holes traverse the property's most interesting topography.
Anyway, the site of the national Mid-Am got me thinking about the many terrific GTA courses. Now, I'm not saying the GTA has a Winged Foot (West) or a Plainfield, which are both in the Metropolitan New York City area. There's no Pine Valley or Merion, both in the Philadelphia area. There's no Chicago Golf Club. These courses are 10s, or very near. The GTA has many eights and nines, more, I'd argue than any other big city; and it has many sevens.
Here's my list of a baker's dozen, plus one, of my favourite GTA courses. I'm not arguing that these are the "best" courses, although many belong in that list as well. They're simply my favourites. You will have your favourites, and they could be different right through. There's quantity in the GTA, for sure. But there's also quality, the factor that makes Toronto such a splendid golf city.
My list of favourites, in alphabetical order:
Beacon Hall
Coppinwood
Devil's Paintbrush
Goodwood
Maple Downs (where I'm a member)
National
Osprey Valley (Heathlands)
Rosedale
Scarboro
St. George's
Summit
Toronto
Weston
Wyndance
A final comment: Some twenty years ago I took architect Tom Doak on what he referred to in his book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses as a "whirlwind tour of the Toronto courses, 12 in three and a half days." He didn't see Beacon Hall. Coppinwood, Goodwood, and Wyndance weren't built. He saw the Devil's Paintbrush under construction, and wrote that he was curious to see it when it was completed because it was on such good land.
It is indeed on good land. Many GTA courses are. That's one reason the courses in many cases are exceptional.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein