Golf in Michigan

Michigan is the only state in the contiguous United States made up of two separate peninsulas, a geography that has profoundly shaped both the character of its land and the diversity of its golf. The Lower Peninsula (the mitten shape that Michigan residents trace on their palm when explaining where they're from) and the Upper Peninsula, separated by the Straits of Mackinac, together encompass over 3,000 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, more freshwater coastline than any other state and more than most nations.

Golf in Michigan reflects this geographic breadth. In the northern Lower Peninsula, communities like Gaylord, Petoskey, and Traverse City have developed into genuine golf resort destinations, with courses by Robert Trent Jones Sr., Alister MacKenzie, Jack Nicklaus, and Rick Smith taking advantage of rolling glacial terrain, forested ridgelines, and views across the Great Lakes that rival any golf setting in the country. Crystal Downs Country Club near Frankfort, designed by MacKenzie and Perry Maxwell and opened in 1933, regularly appears on national lists of the finest courses in America: its dune-backed terrain along Lake Michigan is among the most distinctive pieces of ground in American golf.

The southeastern Michigan metropolitan area (Detroit and the suburban counties of Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne) contains one of the most concentrated markets for golf in the Midwest, with private clubs whose histories are entwined with the automotive industry's great families and public courses that serve one of the most golf-active populations in the country. Oakland County in particular developed a remarkable concentration of private clubs in the postwar era, reflecting the prosperity that automobile manufacturing brought to the region.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula offers a different kind of golf entirely. In communities like Marquette, Sault Ste. Marie, and the Copper Country of the Keweenaw Peninsula, courses play through terrain shaped by the same forces that created the iron and copper deposits that defined the UP's economic history: glacially scoured bedrock, ancient rock formations, and the dramatic shoreline of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. The season is shorter, the winters more severe, but the UP's golf landscapes carry a rugged natural integrity that the more developed resort markets of the Lower Peninsula cannot replicate.

Between the resort north and the metropolitan south, and throughout both peninsulas, Michigan's varied golf landscape includes lake-country resort courses, agricultural-community nine-hole tracks, tribal-nation facilities, university golf programs, and the full spectrum of the American golf market. The state's 800-plus courses (ranging from Treetops Resort's Rick Smith signature courses to a farmer's field nine-holer in the Thumb) reflect a golf culture shaped by the Great Lakes, the automobile age, and the persistent Michigan conviction that good golf is not merely a coastal or resort-country prerogative.