The Best Logos in Golf
By what criteria does one rate the logos of golf? First, it must be said that my good friends who helped me produce the list for my new book—Clay Jackson, Lou DiLorenzo and Gee Aldridge—each applied his own definition of greatness, producing an objective tally of subjective judgments. However, certain qualities consistently separated the best from the rest.
The first is distinctiveness. A great golf logo is immediately recognizable and unmistakably its own. Closely related is heritage. The strongest marks reflect something real about the club’s story, culture or physical setting. Design quality matters as well: balance, clarity, thoughtful typography and symbolism that rewards closer inspection while remaining legible from a distance. Timelessness and simplicity are essential. The best logos avoid trendiness or clutter. They carry a quiet authority that allows them to endure for generations. Symbolism deepens the connection between club and place—whether drawn from geography, heraldry, wildlife or history. Versatility is another hallmark. A golf logo is an unusually migratory creature and must function comfortably whether carved above a clubhouse door, tiled into the bottom of a swimming pool or embroidered over a member’s heart. Finally, there is the backstory. As the one tasked with sharing the saga behind each of these logos, I will admit I was biased toward those with the most interesting evolutions.
A golf club logo is rarely mere ornament. It carries memory, identity and meaning. Sometimes it serves as an invitation; at others, a barrier—or even a passport. An enamel pin exchanged across a clubhouse bar can open doors continents away. A bag tag swinging from a travel cover in an airport speaks volumes without a word. In the end, the mark does what it has always done since Cain, marked by God for killing Abel, walked east of Eden: It tells who we are. And in golf, perhaps even more pointedly, it tells where we belong.
All this week we'll reveal a handful of the logos that made the top 100, excerpting from the book and offering a peek into the fascinating stories of the marks many golfers have grown to love.
Friar's Head
Baiting Hollow, N.Y.
Had you been a merchant sailor in the early 19th century, cruising along the north shore of Long Island, one of the landforms guiding your path would have been a massive dome of white sand with a ring of dense vegetation just below its peak, such that it resembled the shaved crown of a giant monk. This was the landmark known as Friar’s Head.
Nearly 200 years later, Friar’s Head became the guiding inspiration for businessman Ken Bakst, an outstanding golfer in the New York area who had just won the 1997 U.S. Mid-Amateur. Bakst had dreamt of developing his own golf club since he was a kid, and when he came upon the land surrounding Friar’s Head—350 acres of windswept terrain, much of it on a 200-foot-high bluff overlooking Long Island Sound—he knew he had found something special.
His first call was to the architectural team of Coore & Crenshaw, who toured the property with him and came away awestruck by what they deemed the most exciting golf terrain they’d seen since Sand Hills. But they were also concerned—and intimidated—by its proximity to the great triumvirate of courses a few miles to the east: Maidstone, National and Shinnecock.
They needn’t have worried. The course they produced immediately took its place beside those three while also inviting comparisons to both Cypress Point and Pine Valley. Today Friar’s Head ranks 14th on Golf Digest’s list of America’s 100 best courses.
“Bill and Ben were terrific to work with,” Bakst says, “and they made only one request, but it was non-negotiable: The name of the course had to be Friar’s Head. They kind of double-teamed me, so I relented with the caveat that it would never be Friar’s Head Golf Club or Country Club, just Friar’s Head.”
But now he had a challenge in finding a logo, the bald pate of a Benedictine monk being a less than captivating emblem. From day one, the club’s vibe had been both elite and understated, even a bit mysterious, and such is reflected by the slender, minimalist logo that Bakst chose: a flag-stick topped, curiously, by a pair of nautical flags. The idea came from one of his friends, Tommy Naccarato, a longtime architecture buff who had worked as a researcher and draftsman for several designers including Gil Hanse, Todd Eckenrode, Jim Urbina and Geoff Shackelford.
“At the time of my inspiration I wasn’t thinking of ‘F’ and ‘H,’ Naccarato admitted, “rather ‘B’ and ‘C’ for Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw, but I can recall Ken’s response as if it were today: ‘Ben and Bill would shoot me if I ever did something like that. Besides, we aren’t going to be waving multi-colored flags at Friar’s Head as if it were the United Nations.’”
Naccarato continued, “I sent him a link to a website with the flags anyway, and when he plugged in the ‘F’ and ‘H,’ he came up with two red-and-white flags, and I think the idea immediately resonated. As it turns out, there are only four letters paired with a red-and- white nautical flag and two of them happen to be ‘F’ and ‘H.’”
Bakst liked the idea so much, he extended it to the golf course: each hole has a red- and white-striped flagstick topped with both flags.
Boston Golf Club
Hingham, Mass.
Boston Golf Club was founded in 2005 with a resolve to honor the game’s traditions. Its minimalist course designed by Gil Hanse, walking-only policy, and no-frills clubhouse all reflect an admiration for the original courses and clubs of the United Kingdom.
The club’s emblem, however, conveys something other than wistful reverence for the Brits—at least the Brits who occupied Boston two and a half centuries ago. It’s a recreation of the Sons of Liberty flag: an American historical artifact that was the first symbol of colonial resistance to the British monarchy. Its nine red-and-white stripes—the “Rebellious Stripes”—represent the nine original colonies that protested the Stamp Act.
The Sons of Liberty—whose members included Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere—were a clandestine group of patriots who organized protests and direct action. Whenever they planned a gathering, in order not to arouse suspicion from British supporters, they flew their flag from the Liberty Tree: a large elm that stood at the modern intersection of Washington and Essex Streets in downtown Boston. Eventually the Loyalists caught on, and during the siege of Boston in 1775, the tree was cut down, but the “Liberty Stump” continued as a place for political meetings. The site is now marked by historical plaques.
A second version of the Sons of Liberty flag soon arose, with 13 stripes symbolizing the 13 colonies that eventually joined the Revolution, and that flag is considered the precursor to the American flag. Meanwhile, an original of the nine-stripe flag is on display at the Old State House Museum in Boston, while—20 miles to the south—a faithful reproduction hangs from an elm tree beside the Boston Golf Club.
The flag was designed by member Ed Maher—its slightly tattered, distressed condition a nod to the worn and weathered original used by the forefathers. The initial logo included the club’s name, but now the flag flies elegantly alone. Wherever the words “Boston Golf Club” do appear—as on stationery and signage—they’re set in an antique script typeface with an apt name: Constitution.
OHOOPEE MATCH CLUB
Cobbtown, Ga.
When you build your dream course in the middle of a 3,400-acre onion farm, there’s only one option for the club symbol, and tech magnate Michael Walrath went with it. That, however, may be the only predictable move he made in creating one of the game’s truly unique places to stay and play.
The Ohoopee Match Club arose as a result of Walrath’s 40th birthday, when he took a bunch of his high school and college buddies on a celebratory golf trip. At some point during that weekend—likely, he admits, after a sufficiency of alcohol—he promised to make it an annual event. Over the next few years, he and his pals made visits to a number of different resorts and private clubs. During that time, he took note of the aspects he liked and didn’t like about each club, course, and experience. And those notes evolved into a 20-page manifesto outlining his vision for the ideal club.
In 2018, it came to life about an hour from Savannah, on the outskirts of a small town in rural Georgia, bordered by the Ohoopee River. Architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner had been involved with the land a decade earlier in a separate project that was scrapped because of the global financial crisis. Walrath brought them back with the directive to create a golf course designed purely for match play—a fun-filled journey replete with halfpar holes and risk/reward strategies, where every assignment demanded thought, every situation was pivotal.
Hanse and Wagner responded with not just 18 holes, but 22—the four additional holes available as an option to replace Holes 2 through 5 and form a shorter, alternate loop known as the Whiskey Routing. Along with the course came first-class hospitality—high-end food, service, and accommodation—with an aim of creating a memorable experience. The club has just 100 members but actively encourages both accompanied and unaccompanied guests to sample the Ohoopee atmosphere.
The iconic onion appears in indigo blue in homage to the Indigo Snake, a non-venomous and generally docile resident of the property. Look closely at the logo, designed by Walrath in collaboration with Greyson Clothing CEO and Ohoopee member Charlie Schaefer. Poking out of the top of the onion are three snake tails, and at the bottom are three heads.
MYOPIA HUNT CLUB
South Hamilton, Mass.
At first blush, the notion of a club named Myopia—the medical term for nearsightedness—being represented by a fox—an animal with famously sharp vision—seems like a twisted joke. But the club’s history shows it all makes sense.
Regarded by some historians as the oldest country club in America, Myopia had its beginnings in the town of Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1875, the four sons of Frederick Prince—who would eventually become the mayor of Boston—formed a neighborhood baseball team. It just so happened that all four brothers, as well as a couple of their pals, had eyesight poor enough to wear spectacles, so they good-naturedly dubbed themselves the Myopia Nine. Four years later, after their sporting interests had expanded to include tennis, water sports, horse racing, fox hunting, and steeplechase, they incorporated themselves as the Myopia Club. They built a clubhouse overlooking a nearby lake named, ironically, Mystic. That hillside site would eventually become the home of the Winchester Country Club.
When the equestrian pursuits began to take precedence, several members sought to move closer to Boston, and the result was the founding of The Country Club in Brookline, several of whose charter members were Myopians. Meanwhile, the Myopia sportsmen began to feel the lure of another game, one that had just arrived in America: golf. The appeal was so strong that those members who felt protective of the club’s horsey origins pushed through a club by-law: for every golfer joining the club, two new equestrian members would be admitted. The golf movement was inexorable, however, and in 1882 the club relocated once again, this time to a large farm in nearby South Hamilton. In 1894, they opened a rudimentary nine-hole golf course, laid out initially by member R.M. Appleton.
The first tournament held on that course was won by a former Harvard baseball and football player named Herbert Leeds, who later revamped Appleton’s work and added a second nine. His design has remained substantially unchanged for 125 years. Myopia hosted four U.S. Opens from 1898 to 1908, with the 1898 edition staged as eight rounds of nine holes, as the club’s second nine was not completed until 1901. The champion that year was the Scotsman Willie Anderson, who shot a record-high total of 331—and even after that he had to defeat Alex Smith in an 18-hole playoff, in which they shot 85 and 86. Interestingly, Anderson’s caddie in that Open, a fellow named John Jones, finished 12th, playing an additional two nines of his own each day. Willie Anderson would go on to win four U.S. Opens, including an unequaled three consecutive titles from 1903-05, the last of them back at Myopia.
Through it all, the Myopians never gave up their horses. Myopia Hunt Club remains just that: a venue for polo matches open to the public on Saturdays throughout the summer, and fox hunts throughout August and September. Today the club practices the more humane method of “drag hunting,” where hounds follow an artificially laid scent rather than a live fox.
And so, Myopia’s fox-and-horn logo remains: a proud symbol of the club’s rich history and the legacy of a quartet of lads who, despite their impairment, displayed remarkable vision.
The Best Logos in Golf, by George Peper and published by Back Nine Press, is available at www.back9press.com. The standard edition is $90 and the limited Edition is $150.