Ask most golfers to name the best course in the world and a surprising number will land on one they have never seen played and have almost no chance of ever walking. Pine Valley, set among 623 acres of sandy pine barrens outside Philadelphia, has held the top spot in Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s greatest courses for most of the last decade and the top spot in Golf Magazine’s world ranking for close to two. It has hosted the Walker Cup twice and will host the Curtis Cup in 2034. It has never once hosted a men’s major, a PGA Tour event, or anything resembling a televised professional field, and the club seems entirely at ease with that arrangement continuing indefinitely.
A Hotelier’s Folly
The course exists because George Crump, a Philadelphia hotelier who knew the sandy pinelands of southern New Jersey from hunting trips, decided in 1913 that he could build something better than what already existed nearby. He had never designed a golf course before and would design only this one. He sold his hotel to fund the project, then spent years draining marshland and pulling 22,000 tree stumps with steam winches, at a time when most courses were still routed around whatever the land happened to offer without much reshaping at all. Locals took to calling it Crump’s Folly. He brought in some of the era’s finest architects to help him get it right, among them A.W. Tillinghast, Hugh Wilson, George C. Thomas Jr. and H.S. Colt, and set himself a handful of rules that still shape how the course plays: no hole should run parallel to the next, no more than two consecutive holes should face the same direction, and a player should never be able to see any hole but the one in front of them. Crump died in 1918, reportedly broke, with four holes still unfinished. They were completed without him in 1922.
Robert Trent Jones called it, in roughly these words, the most difficult course in the world and the one with more classic holes than any other. Johnny Miller went further still: no weak holes, every one a masterpiece, a surprise around every corner. Neither assessment reads like exaggeration once the numbers are in front of you. The championship tees stretch to 7,201 yards at a par of 70, with a course rating of 76.6 and a slope of 155, figures that put it among the hardest tests in golf despite a routing that almost nobody outside its membership ever gets to try.
One Afternoon a Year
Membership is by invitation of the board, runs to roughly 930 names spread across the world, and is treated as a closely guarded secret, though enough names have leaked out over the decades to include a former president, a Bond actor, and a long run of touring professionals and architects who wanted to be near the course as much as play it. For everyone else there is exactly one route in: the final day of the Crump Cup, the club’s amateur invitational, held on the last Sunday in September, when spectators can park at a nearby amusement park, ride a bus down a private road, and walk the grounds for an afternoon. Cameras, video recorders and phones are not permitted. It is the only day of the year that photographs of the course are not, in effect, controlled by the club itself, which is as good a reason as any why decent images of Pine Valley are so hard to come by, and why most golfers know the course entirely by reputation rather than by sight.
That exclusivity has not gone unexamined. In 2022 the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights filed a complaint alleging the club’s rules barred women from membership and restricted their access to the grounds. A settlement reached the following year saw Pine Valley end the practice, begin admitting women as members, and commit two hundred thousand dollars combined to civil rights compliance and scholarships supporting women in golf.
None of that has cost Pine Valley its ranking or its mystique. There is something almost old-fashioned about a golf course that has spent well over a century refusing to perform for an audience. Every other course in the conversation for best in the world has, at some point, hosted the sport’s biggest names in front of cameras and grandstands. Pine Valley has hosted amateurs, a handful of exhibitions, and its own membership, and left the rest of golf to take the reputation largely on faith. For a game that increasingly measures its great courses by how they look on television, that refusal is its own kind of statement.