The best TPC golf courses

The famed home of the WM Phoenix Open boasts probably the most well-known stadium hole in golf: the par-3 16th. Tiger Woods' hole-in-one in 1997 put it on the map for casual fans, who now flock to Scottsdale during Super Bowl week. The layout has architectural merit, too, with its risk-and-reward-filled back nine. Tom Weiskopf, who designed the course with Jay Morrish, has overseen renovations of the course—making tweaks to please the tour player and resort guest alike.

Across the street from the Olympic Club is San Francisco's most famous muny, designed by the same architect, Willie Watson. Framed by eucalyptus, cypress and monterey pines, TPC Harding Park hosted a PGA Tour event in the 1950s and 1960s. And it hosted the 2020 PGA Championship, won by Collin Morikawa, after a significant renovation a couple years prior. The course also hosted the 2009 Presidents Cup, as well as the 1937 and 1956 U.S. Amateur Public Links.

TPC Craig Ranch, located in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, is a Tom Weiskopf design that plays among gently rolling hills and on the limestone banks of Rowlett Creek, which crosses the course 14 times. In 2020, the course signed a five-year agreement to host the PGA Tour’s AT&T Byron Nelson. South Korean K.H. Lee captured the first two titles at TPC Craig Ranch, which surrendered low scoring in each of the three years it's held the event, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

The John Deere Classic began in 1971 as the Quad Cities Open (named for the four cities—Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline—that border the Iowa and Illinois sides of the Mississippi River, respectively). It moved to its current home, TPC Deere Run, in 2000, a layout designed at that time by former PGA Tour player D.A. Weibring and design partner Steve Wolfard. The architecture is befitting of a course that came off the desk of a tour pro and was calibrated to host a professional event: Though the strength of the field is typically diluted given the tournament’s traditional place on the schedule the week before the Open Championship, it’s a venue the players who participate in the John Deere Classic love.The routing constantly switches directions as it winds through a wooded property near Rock River, and most holes have some degree of left-to-right or right-to-left movement caused by doglegs and bunkers. At just over 7,200 yards and yielding winning scores around 20-under, it’s an attractive test for shorter players who like to work the ball as well as for those in dire need of seeing plenty of birdies on their card. --Derek Duncan

TPC San Antonio’s Oaks course has hosted the Valero Texas Open since 2010. Playing through the dry outlands north of the city, the Greg Norman design is one of the most strategically compelling courses on tour with aggressive bunkering, some wonderful short par 4s and several uniquely demanding par 5s, including the 18th, one of the most underrated and frustrating closing holes the professionals play. --Derek Duncan, architecture editor

The Ron Prichard design (with consultation from Hubert Green and Fuzzy Zoeller) has hosted an event on the PGA Tour since 1989, and starting in 2022, it hosts one of the premier events on the PGA Tour schedule, the first leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs. Located about a half hour from downtown Memphis on an old dairy farm, TPC Southwind holds its own against the best players in the game with water coming into play on 11 holes. The par-3 11th hole is perhaps the course's signature hole, featuring a peninsula green that requires a short iron, similar to the 17th at TPC Sawgrass' Stadium course. The hole will be memorable for anyone who watched the 2022 FedEx St. Jude Championship, when Will Zalatoris' tee shot ended up staying dry and wedging itself between the grass, in his playoff victory over Sepp Straka.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten: I walked TPC Colorado with its architect, Art Schaupeter, during a Korn Ferry Tour event in 2019. The course is located north of Denver, south of Fort Collins, on highlands where the Great Plains intersects the Rocky Mountains. It's a layout serving a residential development called Heron Lakes and stretches along the east side of Lonetree Reservoir. Art explained to me that back in 2004, he'd done Highland Meadows Golf Club in nearby Windsor, Colo. for developer John Turner, who then hired him to design this course. But the project got put on hold until 2015. Art had just dusted off his 10-year-old blueprints and started staking the course when Turner informed him that he'd contracted with the PGA Tour to license the course as part of the TPC network. Schaupeter, a 1990 University of Colorado grad who worked for architect Keith Foster for eight years before forming his own design company in St. Louis, was pumped. This would be the first TPC course built in over a decade, and the challenge would be to make it playable for homeowners yet difficult for pros. This tournament would not enlighten us on how difficult the course might be, because the PGA Tour chose to play the course considerably shorter than the 7,991 yards Schaupeter had provided as championship tees. (If that sounds like a ridiculous length, remember this is mile-high Colorado, where the air is thinner and the ball goes farther.) We got to the par-5 13th, and Art explained how he made it measure 773 yards in order to provide a true three-shot par 5, something absent in championship golf today. To make pros dial in on the second shot, Art created an enormous Hell Bunker, a huge complex of sculptured bunkers with some edges of stacked sod, right in line with a tour pro's second shot. But Korn Ferry players weren't playing the hole from the back tees. They were playing it from the members' tee, 590 yards that played probably 530 yards. Tour players' drives were nearly reaching Hell Bunker from that tee, and their second shots were routinely on or around the green. So much for bringing back the true three-shot par 5. Art was pleased that his par-4 18th hole was playing at its maximum length of 534 yards, uphill all the way, and we did see some players struggle to reach the wide, shallow green in regulation. But Schaupeter was disappointed that the tour had removed the joint fairway that had linked the 18th with the parallel par-4 17th. Tour officials felt such a wide fairway would take the fairway bunker to the right of 18 out of play, so they turned the joint neck of fairway into rough. So much for architectural innovation. My favorite holes at TPC Colorado are its par 3s. The second features a diagonal Biarritz green with water in front, on the left and around the back and back right. While a Biarritz green on a near-island might seem like overkill, I liked it, especially because Art made the trench wide enough to accommodate pin positions.

Gil Hanse's team completed renovation on the 12th and 13th holes at TPC Boston in 2017, completing a 10-plus-year project in which Hanse's team attempted to reestablish a New England-type style to the course. The course, which sits about 45 minutes from downtown Boston, was the longtime host of a FedEx Cup Playoff event on the PGA Tour.

TPC’s stadium concept was the idea of then-PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman. The 1980 design was pure Pete Dye, who set out to test the world’s best golfers by mixing demands of distance with target golf. Most greens are ringed by random lumps, bumps and hollows, what Dye calls his "grenade attack architecture." His ultimate target hole is the heart-pounding sink-or-swim island green 17th, which offers no bailout, perhaps unfairly in windy Atlantic coast conditions. The 17th has spawned over a hundred imitation island greens in the past 40 years. To make the layout even more exciting during tournament play, Steve Wenzloff of PGA Tour Design Services recently remodeled several holes, most significantly the 12th, which is now a drivable par 4.