The Tour Championship gets under way this week at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, and by now the fact barely registers as news. East Lake has been the permanent home of the FedExCup finale since 2005, long enough that a generation of Tour players has never known the season to end anywhere else. What gets lost in that familiarity is how unlikely a home this particular course was to become. East Lake is not just the place where Bobby Jones learned the game as a boy. It is a course that was nearly lost altogether, saved only because one Atlanta businessman decided a golf course could be the instrument of rebuilding an entire neighbourhood, not just a golf club.
Where Bobby Jones started
East Lake opened on the fourth of July in 1908, laid out by Tom Bendelow on land east of downtown Atlanta, with a six-year-old Robert Tyre Jones Jr. among the members watching the ribbon cut. Jones would go on to win thirteen national championships between 1923 and 1930, four U.S. Opens, five U.S. Amateurs, three Open Championships and the 1930 Grand Slam, all four of the game’s biggest events in a single year, a feat that still stands alone. He learned to play at East Lake, kept his home course there throughout his amateur career, and later turned his hand to course design himself, most famously at Augusta National. The connection between East Lake and Jones is not a marketing story bolted on for the Tour Championship. It is the actual foundation the club was built on, and it is the reason the course still carries his name into every conversation about it nearly a century later.
Donald Ross was brought in to rework Bendelow’s original routing in 1913, sending each nine back to the clubhouse and giving the course the bones that, in a roundabout way, it is still playing off today. A second course, also by Ross, opened in 1930 to coincide with the closing day of Jones’s British Amateur win that year, the same summer he completed the Grand Slam. For a couple of decades East Lake was, by any measure, one of the most important addresses in American golf.
The fall
It did not stay that way. Atlanta’s east side went through the kind of decline that hit American inner cities hard through the 1960s and 1970s, and East Lake went down with the neighbourhood around it. In 1970, the club’s second course was demolished to make way for East Lake Meadows, a public housing project that within a few years had become synonymous with poverty, drugs and violence, one of the most troubled addresses in the city. The original course survived only because a group of members bought the club outright in 1968 to keep it running as a private facility, but survival was about all it managed. By the 1980s, the golf course where Bobby Jones learned to play was tired, under-invested, and largely forgotten, sitting inside a neighbourhood most of Atlanta had written off.
The revival, and the neighbourhood with it
The turn came in 1993, when Atlanta developer and philanthropist Tom Cousins bought the club and donated it to a charitable foundation with a specific idea attached. Cousins was not interested in simply restoring a golf course for its own sake. He believed a revived East Lake could be the anchor for rebuilding the community around it, and rather than displace the low-income residents of East Lake Meadows for something more profitable, the foundation he set up worked to redevelop the housing, fund a new school, and rebuild the neighbourhood alongside the golf course rather than instead of it. Rees Jones handled the course restoration itself, bringing back the Ross character that decades of drift had eroded, and the club reopened in 1996 to host the Tour Championship for the first time two years later. By 2005 it had become the tournament’s permanent home, and the wider East Lake redevelopment is now held up as one of the more genuine examples of golf being used as urban renewal rather than urban displacement.
The course has kept evolving since. A 2024 restoration led by Andrew Green, whose Ross-revival work includes Inverness, Scioto and Oak Hill, pushed the layout further back toward its original character, reshaping bunkers with the natural, grassed-in look Ross favoured and giving the greens back some of the movement that had been softened out of them over the decades. The most talked-about hole remains the closing one, a par five that has decided more FedExCups than any single hole has a right to, generous enough off the tee to tempt the game’s longest hitters into going for the green in two, and demanding enough with a firm, sloped putting surface that plenty of those attempts have gone wrong in front of a grandstand full of people who came specifically to watch it happen.
Why it still matters
There is no shortage of golf courses with a Donald Ross pedigree, and no shortage of clubs that like to invoke a famous former member. What sets East Lake apart is that its two defining stories, the Bobby Jones origin and the East Lake Meadows revival, are not really separate stories at all. Both are about a piece of land in Atlanta being treated as something worth investing in for reasons beyond the golf itself. When this year’s field walks up the eighteenth fairway with the FedExCup on the line, they are playing out the latest chapter of a course that has already been rebuilt once, from the ground up, by people who thought it mattered enough to save.