The class of 1926: why golf's best courses are turning 100 this year
In 1926, America was flush with cash, obsessed with leisure, and three years away from losing all of it. The stock market wouldn't crash until October 1929, but the golf course architects of the Roaring Twenties didn't know that. They were spending money like it would never run out, blasting through Connecticut bedrock with dynamite and sculpting Southern California canyons into fairways. The courses they built that year still rank among the finest on the planet.
This is the story of the class of 1926, and what it tells us about why some golf courses last forever.
The architects and their playgrounds
The roster of designers working in 1926 reads like a hall of fame ballot. Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor. George C. Thomas Jr. A.W. Tillinghast. Donald Ross. These weren't weekend hobbyists. They were the best in the world, working at the peak of their powers, with budgets that wouldn't be matched (adjusted for inflation) for decades.
Look at what they produced in a single year.
At Yale Golf Course in New Haven, Macdonald and Raynor's crew blew $400,000 worth of dynamite through solid Connecticut rock to carve 18 holes out of terrain that had no business becoming a golf course. It was the most expensive course ever built at the time.
Out in Pacific Palisades, George Thomas spent 18 months and 15 different design iterations on Riviera Country Club before settling on his final layout. Construction cost $250,000, nearly four times the average for courses built in that era. Alister MacKenzie visited during construction and called the routing "as close to perfect as possible."
Raynor also built Fishers Island Club on an island in the Long Island Sound, reachable only by ferry or private boat. That isolation has kept it frozen in time better than almost any course in America.
Bel-Air Country Club went up in a Los Angeles canyon with elevation changes that make carts feel like amusement park rides. And in Maryland, Tillinghast laid out Baltimore Country Club's East Course with 96 bunkers and a par of 70, greens pitching back-to-front with a consistency that borders on obsession.
What $400,000 in dynamite buys you
The Yale story deserves its own section because it's the wildest construction tale in American golf.
Macdonald was already famous by 1926. He'd built the National Golf Links of America in 1911, importing the template hole concept from Scotland and building what many considered the first great American course. Raynor was his protege, the surveyor-turned-architect who had refined the template approach into something approaching science.
Southern Connecticut gave them nothing to work with. Dense forest, exposed ledge, rocky outcroppings. The kind of terrain where a reasonable person would look elsewhere. Macdonald and Raynor looked at it and saw potential that required industrial explosives to unlock.
The result was 18 holes that read like a greatest-hits album of template design: a Redan, a Biarritz, a Short, a Cape. The third hole features a double punch bowl green. The sixth has two inverted bunkers, a Raynor rarity. The eighteenth splits into a double fairway, forcing players to choose their line off the tee based on the pin position they can't yet see.
Raynor died in January 1926, months before Yale opened. He never saw the finished course.
A century of neglect and rescue
Here's the thing about great architecture: it's easy to ruin. Decades of deferred maintenance, well-meaning but misguided renovations, and changing tastes can erode a course until the original design is barely recognizable. It happened at Yale. Greens shrank. Bunkers softened. The template features that made the course special got buried under decades of accumulated turf and altered contours.
Gil Hanse, the architect behind the 2016 Olympic course in Rio, took on the restoration. His team spent $25 million returning Yale to its 1926 dimensions, rebuilding greens to USGA specifications for the first time, restoring that double punch bowl on the third hole, and installing modern irrigation that the original designers couldn't have imagined.
Yale reopens on April 28 of this year, its centennial. You can play it. It's a public course, attached to a private university, open to anyone willing to pay the green fee. That alone makes it one of the most accessible masterpieces in golf.
Riviera at 100: still the benchmark
While Yale went through decline and restoration, Riviera took a different path. Continuous high-profile tournament play, from the L.A. Open starting in 1929 to the modern Genesis Invitational, kept the course in the spotlight and gave the club reason to maintain Thomas's design intent.
The centennial year has been busy. The Genesis Invitational ran in February with the usual stacked field. The U.S. Women's Open comes to Riviera in June, the first time the club has hosted that championship. It's a fitting tribute to a course that Thomas himself called his masterpiece, and that the PGA Tour has featured for the better part of a century.
What makes Riviera last? The same thing that makes all these 1926 courses last: strategic options. Thomas built holes where there's always more than one way to play them. The barranca slashing across the eighteenth fairway. The pot bunker sitting in the middle of the sixth green. The short par-four tenth where you can drive it or lay back. Every hole asks a question, and the right answer changes depending on the wind, the pin, and how much nerve you've got.
Why 1926 matters now
Golf architecture runs in cycles. The Golden Age, roughly 1910 to 1935, produced courses that favored strategy over raw length. The postwar era brought target golf, water hazards, and cart paths. The 1990s and 2000s gave us 7,500-yard monsters designed for television. And now? The pendulum has swung back.
The hottest names in modern design, Gil Hanse, Coore & Crenshaw, Tom Doak, are all students of Golden Age principles. Wide fairways. Ground-game options. Greens that reward precision over power. The new courses getting the most buzz in 2026, places like Wild Spring Dunes in Texas and Rodeo Dunes in Colorado, could pass for lost Golden Age designs if you squinted.
That's not an accident. The architects of 1926 figured something out that took the rest of the industry 70 years to relearn: golf is more fun when you have choices. When a hole asks you to think instead of just swing hard. When the ground matters as much as the air.
A hundred years later, Macdonald, Raynor, Thomas, Tillinghast, and Ross are still teaching that lesson. Their classrooms just happen to be some of the best courses on Earth.
