Best golf courses near Fort Worth, TX

Robert Trent Jones designed Shady Oaks, best known as being Ben Hogan's home club in the decades after his retirement, in the mid-1950s for founder Marvin Leonard. The design of the course was state of the art and emblematic of the new style of design: heavily engineered; long, with narrow fairways thorugh treeliined corridors that placed a premium on driving accuracy; and large, sectioned greens. That mode prevailed until 2020 when the club hired the Australiian firm of Ogilvy, Cocking and Mead to remodel the course. The architiects infused it with a bigger, more sweeping style of bunker, removed trees, and shifted and extended greens. It's once again a course that reflects the popular architecture of the moment.

We give credit to Texas golf historian Frances G. Trimble for establishing the fact that Perry Maxwell, not John Bredemus, originally designed Colonial Country Club for Fort Worth businessman Marvin Leonard. Both architects submitted routings. Maxwell’s was used, while Bredemus supervised construction. Colonial sported the first bent-grass greens in Texas when it opened in 1936. In 1939, the USGA awarded Colonial its 1941 U.S. Open, the first ever in Texas, so Leonard brought Maxwell back to toughen the course. He added 56 bunkers and created the present par-3 fourth and par-4 fifth (two of the famed Horrible Horseshoe trio of holes) and a par-3 13th (since replaced following a 1968 rechanneling of the Trinity River). Keith Foster’s 2008 restoration wasn’t to everyone’s satisfaction. In 2023, Gil Hanse and his team will perform a complete restoration of the Maxwell design, giving it a similar treatment to the one they gave Maxwell's Southern Hills in 2018.

Robert Trent Jones designed Shady Oaks, best known as being Ben Hogan's home club in the decades after his retirement, in the mid-1950s for founder Marvin Leonard. The design of the course was state of the art and emblematic of the new style of design: heavily engineered; long, with narrow fairways thorugh treeliined corridors that placed a premium on driving accuracy; and large, sectioned greens. That mode prevailed until 2020 when the club hired the Australiian firm of Ogilvy, Cocking and Mead to remodel the course. The architiects infused it with a bigger, more sweeping style of bunker, removed trees, and shifted and extended greens. It's once again a course that reflects the popular architecture of the moment.