The Most Famous Golf Courses in Los Angeles
Ask a golfer anywhere in the world to name one hole in Los Angeles and you'll get the same answer: the 18th at Riviera, the long par 4 climbing to a green set in a natural amphitheater beneath the clubhouse. That is what fame in golf looks like — not a gate or a waiting list, but a picture millions of people carry in their heads. Los Angeles has produced more of those pictures than any golf city in America, and it has been accumulating them for a century, from Ben Hogan's run in Pacific Palisades to a U.S. Open decided on a course hidden between Beverly Hills and Century City.
Let's be clear about what this list ranks: fame, not exclusivity. We've already cataloged the most exclusive golf and country clubs in Los Angeles, and while several of those names appear here too, they earn their spot for entirely different reasons. Fame is earned in public — by hosting the Genesis Invitational every February, by staging U.S. Opens and PGA Championships, by counting Bing Crosby and the Marx Brothers as regulars, by doubling as Rose Bowl parking on game day. A course can be impossible to join and still belong to everyone.
The ten most famous golf courses in Los Angeles run from Golden Age masterpieces to a made-for-television canyon in Thousand Oaks — and, happily for the rest of us, three of them will take your green fee.
Riviera Country Club
Start with the obvious. Riviera is "Hogan's Alley" — the nickname Ben Hogan's late-1940s dominance earned it — the permanent home of the Genesis Invitational, host of the 1948 U.S. Open and two PGA Championships, and the course slated to stage golf at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. George C. Thomas Jr.'s 1926 design supplies the game's most recognizable set pieces: the par-3 6th with a bunker in the middle of the green, the drivable 10th, the amphitheater 18th. No course in Los Angeles gets more television time, and none wears it better.
Los Angeles Country Club (North Course)
For decades the North Course was famous precisely for being unseen, hidden behind its membership on Wilshire Boulevard. Then George C. Thomas Jr.'s 1928 design — restored by Gil Hanse in 2010 — stepped into the spotlight with the 2017 Walker Cup and the 2023 U.S. Open, where Wyndham Clark edged Rory McIlroy by a single shot. One major was all it took: the 7,421-yard, par-70 North, with its barrancas and sand-scarred bunkers, is now discussed among the finest championship courses in the country.
Bel-Air Country Club
Bel-Air's fame is architectural theater. To link holes stranded in separate canyons, Thomas and builder Billy Bell drilled tunnels through the ridges, spanned the barrancas with bridges, and put an elevator in the hillside beneath the clubhouse. The result is the Swinging Bridge at the par-3 10th — a tee shot flown across a deep ravine to one of the most photographed crossings in golf. A 2018 Tom Doak restoration revived the 1926 design's original ideas; the club's Hollywood-heavy renown has never needed reviving.
Lakeside Golf Club
No club is more entwined with Hollywood's golden age. Wedged into Toluca Lake between Warner Bros. and Universal, Max Behr's 1924 design was the home course of Bing Crosby — a five-time club champion who played to a 2 — alongside Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, Oliver Hardy and Johnny Weissmuller, with later members running from Sinatra to Nicholson. The compact par-70 is genuine strategic architecture, lovingly restored by Todd Eckenrode, but it's the card-room lore that made Lakeside a legend.
Wilshire Country Club
Wilshire has spent a century hiding in plain sight in Hancock Park, Norman Macbeth's barranca-laced 1919 routing bisected by Beverly Boulevard with a tunnel connecting the nines. It hosted the Los Angeles Open four times between 1928 and 1944, then returned to television as home of the LPGA's LA Open from 2018 to 2022. Howard Hughes's former mansion still borders the course's southern perimeter — the kind of footnote every famous Los Angeles course seems to carry.
Hillcrest Country Club
Hillcrest's fame is cultural as much as competitive. Founded in 1920 as the first country club for Los Angeles's Jewish community, it became the lunchtime home of the comedians' Round Table — Jack Benny, George Burns, Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers — and it hosted the 1929 PGA Championship, won by Leo Diegel, plus two Los Angeles Opens. Kyle Phillips rebuilt the original Willie Watson course in 2019, giving the most storied social club in LA golf a modern championship layout to match its history.
Rancho Park Golf Course
The people's entry, and maybe the most democratic famous course in America. Rancho Park hosted the Los Angeles Open many times, and the tee of its par-5 18th carries a bronze plaque commemorating the 12 Arnold Palmer made there in 1961 — four straight balls out of bounds — before he went on to win three L.A. Opens on this same course anyway. One of the busiest municipal courses in the country, it hands anyone with a city tee time the same tree-lined William P. Bell test the pros faced.
Brookside Golf Club
Brookside is famous by association and honest about it: William P. Bell's 36-hole municipal complex wraps around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena's Arroyo Seco. The championship C.W. Koiner Course hosted the 1968 Los Angeles Open, won by Billy Casper, and since 1982 its fairways have moonlighted as game-day parking for UCLA football and the Rose Bowl Game. There may be no stranger double life in golf — and at 7,228 yards against par 72, the Koiner is a stern test in its own right.
Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles
Fame of a newer, louder kind. The former Ocean Trails — a Pete Dye design whose 18th hole slid toward the sea in a 1999 landslide — reopened in 2006 after a Tom Fazio rework and a rebuild reported at around $264 million, frequently cited as the most expensive golf course ever constructed. All 18 clifftop holes in Rancho Palos Verdes look out at the Pacific, and unlike most of this list it is daily-fee public: anyone willing to pay the premium can play it.
Sherwood Country Club
Sherwood was built for television. Jack Nicklaus's 1989 Signature design sits above Lake Sherwood — so named after Douglas Fairbanks filmed Robin Hood on its shores — and few private clubs anywhere have logged more broadcast hours: Greg Norman's Shark Shootout from 1989 to 1999, the 1999 "Showdown at Sherwood" between Tiger Woods and David Duval (the first prime-time live golf match), Tiger's World Challenge every December from 2000 through 2013, and the PGA Tour's Zozo Championship in 2020. Made-for-TV golf has a home course, and this is it.
Which Famous Course Should You Chase?
If you want to see famous golf, circle February, when the Genesis Invitational puts Riviera on television for four days. If you want to play it, three of the ten take tee times: Rancho Park and Brookside through their city systems, and Trump National at a daily fee — our guide to the best public golf courses in Los Angeles covers the rest of the open-to-everyone tier. And if your ambition is to cross the Swinging Bridge or lunch where the Round Table sat, you'll need a member on your side — fame in Los Angeles, as everywhere, still keeps a guest list.