Sunningdale Golf Club: Old

A strong case can be made that Sunningdale’s Old Course was the first great inland design, and the course that was most successful in emulating the naturalness and strategies inherent in links courses when Willie Park Jr. built it in 1901. Chopped from a pine forest but routed like a links, with the ninth at the far end of the property, it plays like a links, too, for there's a sand base beneath the turf. The Old has big greens, as Park put a premium on approach putting, and artful bunkers, with both angled cross-bunkers and necklaces of sand hampering direct routes to some greens. Harry Colt’s remodel two decades later (he was Sunningdale's first club secretary) brought the Old into the new modern era and is responsible for the playability and ranking the course deserves today. To American visitors, the look of Sunningdale brings to mind Pine Valley or Pinehurst.