Best golf courses near Cleveland, OH

In doing golf course restoration work, golf architects have to be like ghost writers, doing the best work they can while burying their egos and desire for personal attention. Nobody does that better than Bruce Hepner, who has consistently enhanced other people’s architecture without complaint. Canterbury Golf Club had long been considered one of the greats, the site of several major championships, including the 1973 PGA Championship won by Jack Nicklaus. But when Hepner first toured the Herbert Strong design, he found it over-treed and overdue for a bunker renovation. The club continues to understand the wisdom of fine-tuning rather than revamping classical architecture and now works with Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns, two talented associates of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who have assumed the role of Canterbury caretakers by continuing to selectively address tree issues and other restorative detailing.

Located in the historically upscale Pepper Pike section of East Cleveland, The Country Club boasts a topography that is ideal for golf, with smooth elevation changes peppered with moments of abruptly shifting land that William Flynn worked into the design when he built the course in the late 1920s. Standouts include the short, uphill par-4 third with bunkers stepped up the right side and the gorgeous, long downhill seventh, but the really good stuff is on the northwest side of the property. The green at the par-3 11th sits atop a skyline ridge that drops off steeply on the left. Second shots at the par-4 15th must fly uphill over a ridge and a phalanx of diagonal bunkers to a blind green. The par-5 16th crests over a high shoulder before trundling downhill to a heavily bunkered green, and the short par-4 17th bends sharply left around a kettle basin, tempting long players to try to cut the corner. Already a star, "Country's" stock is poised to rise further now that Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner have completed their 2022 renovation of the course that included enlarging bunkers to match the scale and topography of the property, expanding green perimeters and fairways, lowering tees, re-grassing the course and extending the 18th green by approximately 80 yards.

Lakewood, located in a suburb west of Cleveland, opened in 1921 and is the only course in Ohio designed by A.W. Tillinghast. Like most courses of its vintage, it had been modernized through the decades and one of the club’s goals in 2020 when they hired Keith Foster, who has demonstrated his Tillinghast expertise at courses like Brook Hollow in Dallas and Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Wissahickon Course, was to return it to the original routing. The other goal was to imbue it with a more rugged, Golden Age character by converting all the bunkers from flashed sand to a more vintage grass-faced style, expanding the fairway lines, thinning hundreds of trees that had been planted in the 1960s and ‘70s and recapturing an incredible 35,000 square feet of putting surface. Foster also modified Tillinghast’s Great Hazard on the par-5 15th, a vast sandy wasteland that terrorizes second shots in the same vein as the one at Baltusrol Lower’s 17th. The overall results when the course reopened in 2025, and for the efficient price of $6 million, is a drier, faster layout that looks and plays like it might have during the decade it was built.

Just south of downtown Cleveland, Ridgewood is a 6,100-yard layout with generous fairways and large greens, some of which slope significantly from back to front. The course, which hosted the 1927 U.S. Amateur Public Links, offers weekday rates under $30.