Best golf courses near French Lick, IN

Pete Dye’s mountaintop design, Golf Digest’s 2009 Best New Public winner, established that at age 80 the designer still had fresh ideas, including rumpled chipping swales, country-lane cart paths and volcano bunkers. Measuring just over 8,100 yards from the tips, Pete Dye at French Lick is not the first course over 8,000 yards to land on our rankings. That would be, in 1967, the original 8,040-yard Runaway Brook in Massachusetts, later turned into the 8,325-yard Pines Course at The International Golf Club (and now completely remodeled by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, nowhere near 8,000 yards). The world’s longest is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China at 8,548 yards, not counting Australia's Nullarbor Links, a course that stretches 1,365 kilometers with each hole stretched out in a different town along a highway. The yardage may be a talking point, but what golfers will remember about Dye's French Lick course are the multi-mile views in all directions and the roominess of the fairways and greens that hang out over the edges of the sweeping land formations.

If the 2009 Pete Dye course at this historic resort in southern Indiana (ranked No. 118 on America's Second 100 Greatest Courses) is an acrobat swinging trapezes through circles of flame along the site's elevated bluffs, the 1917 Donald Ross course is more of a street-level tilt-a-whirl with holes that rise, fall and roll repeatedly over a gorgous meadow property. Each nine crests over ridges and ride into hollows, rising toward well-bunkered greens that flank slightly crowned putting surfaces. This is an Old World/New World contrast, with both the Dye and Ross courses achieving what they set out to do architecturally, but in rather different ways. Depending on their mood and appreciation for allowing land movements rather than bulldozers to dictate design and direction, golfers at French Lick often prefer the nuance and nature of the Ross course.