Even with a greatly reduced playing schedule and tournament appearances that have become rarer and rarer, Tiger Woods remains the most popular athlete in golf. Every time he does tee it up interest in the tournament spikes, and this week may be the biggest of them all, the Masters, an event he has already won five times. It was also the last of the 15 Major championships he won, in dramatic fashion in 2019.
Augusta National, home of the Masters, has been a magical place for Woods, and may offer him the best shot at a miracle return to glory. But for the vast majority of golfers, simply attending the Masters is a fantasy, while playing the very private course is a non-starter. This is one case where walking in the footsteps of legend is an unlikely proposition, but the good news is there are plenty of other such options.
For starters, there are the courses Woods has actually designed. I think if you are a fan, you get a more direct connection and unique Woods-experience on these rather than by visiting the courses he has played—especially since there are so few of them. Woods’ nascent golf course design business has been successful so far, and he is certainly in demand, but with a schedule that involves still competing and other endeavors such as his new clothing brand, he simply has not had time to do to many courses, and of these, several are private or still in progress.
Far and away the top pick in this category would be Payne’s Valley at the Big Cedar Resort in the beautiful Ozarks region of Missouri. Payne’s (named in honor of Missouri’s beloved golf legend the late Payne Stewart), was the very first public 18-hole layout Woods did in this country, and as such the first opportunity for most American golf fans to actually play one of his courses. I’ve been, I played it, and it is fantastic.
Many top pros like Jack Nicklaus who made the transition from competing to design came out of the gate too tough, as if they were building course for their own best in the world game. The beauty of Payne’s Valley is that it is incredibly user friendly and playable for all abilities, with strategic risk/reward decisions that become more daunting the further back you play, but with immense fairway corridors that give even wayward tee shots room. I wrote in detail about the course here at Forbes (“Tiger Woods’ First Public U.S. Course is Awesome”) so I’ll let you read that instead of diving deep into it again here. But just to give you an idea, the highlights include vast cliff faces of exposed stone, waterfalls, substantial elevation changes, a cave and two island greens, one of them a bonus 19th hole unlike anything in golf. It’s visually stunning and a joy to play.
The other great thing about playing Payne’s Valley is that it is located at one of the nation’s premier golf resorts. Big Cedar Lodge is the passion project of Bass Pros Shops owner Johnny Morris, who has been called “the Walt Disney of retail” for his elaborate, theatrical and visually driven style. You’ll find all of that in spades at Big Cedar, an outdoorsy yet luxurious resort that sits on 42,000-acre Table Rock Lake and has two state of the art marinas, a world-class shooting facility, private nature preserve, all sorts of other activities, and five golf courses including the three best in Missouri. Other star designers featured here along with Woods are Jack Nicklaus, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, Tom Fazio and Gary Player. It’s the one place you can play a fantastic full sized design by Tiger Woods and a weeks’ worth of other great golf without leaving the resort. When the Woods’ course was completed they also added some of Big Cedar’s most luxurious lodging in the form of swank cabins alongside Payne’s Valley.
The next best option is Diamante, a golf resort community in the exploding luxury golf and travel hotspot of Los Cabos, Mexico. A real estate focused golf and beach development, Diamante also has a resort component in the form of vacation rentals (with a 3-night minimum). The golf is also open to outside play and there are more great luxury hotel options in the area than I have room to list. El Cardonal was the first public eighteen Tiger Woods designed in North America, and now hosts an annual PGA Tour stop, the World Wide Technology Championship, so you can kill two golf dreams with one stone, playing a Woods course and playing a PGA Tour venue.
Diamante is another place where you can follow Woods but also get in more great golf. The resort also has a fantastic second eighteen, the Dunes by Davis Love III, which is one of the best in Mexico and ranked on Golf Magazine’s Top 100 list. Woods also designed the Oasis, a 12-hole par-3 course that wraps around an 8-acre lake. Woods is at work on a third eighteen-hole layout here, The Legacy, which is projected to open this fall but is rumored to be private for real estate owners only.
Woods seems to have a fascination with short courses, and in addition to the Oasis at Diamante, you can tee it up on his contribution to America’s most famous golf resort, Pebble Beach. He was chosen as the designer for a replacement for the old Peter Hay short course and his solution was more evocative of the famed resort’s better known 72-holes, including the Pebble Beach Golf Links. In fact, one of the nine holes, the second, is a near exact replica of the most famous par-3 in America, the 7th at Pebble Beach. While that course is very difficult (and very expensive) to get on, the new Hay is just $75, whether you stay here or not, a bargain by this resort’s standards. The Hay also has a Woods’ designed 20,000 square foot natural grass putting course.
While you might not make a destination trip to play 9-hole par-3 course the way you would for Wood’s full designs at Big Cedar and Diamante, Pebble Beach certainly has plenty more golf, with three of the most coveted public courses in the country. It is also a crossover to our next category, great courses that were the sites of Woods victories where you can tee it up. Except he didn’t “just” win at Pebble, he made history. In 2000, in his 100th professional tournament, he won the 100th edition of the U.S. Open, the most difficult Major—15 strokes ahead of the closest competitor. It was the largest margin of victory ever in the U.S. Open and the biggest in any Major since the 1862 Open Championship (British). Golfweek Magazine called it ”The greatest golf ever played.” Oh, and for good measure, he also won the “regular” PGA Tour event here, the AT&T, the same year.
The easiest (and cheapest) way to personally sample Woods’ design work is at PopStroke, the “technology-infused golf-entertainment concept” he is now part owner of. A putting answer to the hugely popular Topgolf chain, it’s slogan is “Eat.Putt.Drink.” and each PopStroke facility has two eighteen hole mini-golf style putting courses, many of them designed by Woods’ TGR Design, plus music, food and lots of beverages. There are around a dozen locations, including golf travel hotspots such as Scottsdale, AZ; Myrtle Beach, SC and Tampa, FL. Several more are coming soon, including Las Vegas.
The other way to experience golf Tiger Woods-style is to play the same public-access venues he has won at. Golf Digest actually did such a compilation, called “Here’s every course you can play where Tiger Woods has won,” so if you want to dive deep, read that (though it doesn’t include international courses). Personally, I’ll only focus on the highlights and notable venues, such as Pebble Beach, above.
There’s no course he has had more success at than Torrey Pines, where his eight wins include another Major, the 2008 U.S. Open. Torrey Pines is already wildly popular for virtue of being one of just handful of Major venues in this country that are public. The Open is played on the South at Torrey Pines, but the regular PGA Tour event uses both eighteens, North and South, and they are both excellent. It’s a municipal facility, not a resort, and because of a local-focused system that gives a great booking edge to San Diego residents, the best way for the rest of golf travelers to experience these layouts is through a stay and play package with guaranteed tee times at the Lodge at Torry Pines, which also happens to be an exceptional luxury resort that literally sits right on the golf course.
The all-time PGA Tour record for most wins in one place is eight, and Tiger has done this three times. Besides Torrey, there is Firestone Country Club, which has long been private but recently added a boutique option for overnight lodging, making it a de facto “public resort,” though on a low key small scale. Once this happened Firestone’s South Course jumped onto the Top 100 You Can Play Lists of Golf Magazine and Golf Digest. The South Course is where Woods won his Major here (Jack Nicklaus also), but given how many events have been played at Firestone, including three PGA Championships, the World Golf Championships and the Bridgestone Senior Championships, marquee tournaments have been on the North Course as well. With 54-holes, caddies and history it’s well worth the effort, and I wrote about its private/public loophole here at Forbes.
Tiger’s third spot for the historic eight-fecta was Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club & Lodge near Orlando, Florida, another legendary golf travel destination, one of the top golf resorts in Florida, and one well worth the effort to visit.
Tiger won five times on another of the most coveted truly public (no resort) courses in America, Cog Hill Number Four, aka Dubsdread, in Chicago. It’s the Windy City’s answer to New York’s Bethpage Black, where Woods won the 2002 U.S. Open. Bethpage has also held the PGA Championship and is scheduled for an upcoming Ryder Cup, after which it will join legendary Pinehurst Number Two, currently the only course on earth that has hosted two different Majors and the Ryder Cup. But actually getting a tee time on the municipal Bethpage Black, one of five eighteen hole courses at the Bethpage State Park facility, is quite an ordeal, and it doesn’t have a luxury resort end-around like Torrey Pines. Cog Hill is extremely busy but you can actually book online tee times in advance, and with four courses, they do multi-day multi-round packages that make the marquee Number Four easier to get on.
Woods only won the PGA Tour’s season opening Sentry Tournament on the Plantation Course (one of two eighteens) at Kapalua once, but it’s a longtime favorite of mine and easily one of the best in Hawaii, which is saying something. After a pandemic $100 million upgrade, the adjacent Ritz-Carlton Kapalua immediately became one of the nation’s top luxury golf resorts, and I love that place, and wrote about it in detail here at Forbes.
Last but not least, I cannot fail to include the Old Course at St. Andrews, though no golfer alive needs Woods as inspiration to visit the game’s Holy Grail. In his miraculous 2000 that saw him win the U.S. Open by the largest margin ever, he also made history at the (British) Open Championship, shooting a record low 19 under par. Five years later he returned and became one of just five players in history to win the Open twice at the Home of Golf. As long as you are making the trip across the pond, Woods also won the Open at England’s Royal Liverpool.
