Jeffrey Kallister has driven operations at S&K Buick GMC in Springfield, Illinois, as the dealership’s owner since 2007. In his free time, Jeffrey Kallister enjoys staying active by golfing on various courses throughout the state. The Illinois golf landscape is dominated by Chicagoland courses, with 33 of Golf Digest’s top 35 courses in the state located in or around the city. Seven courses rank among the top 150 in America.
While Illinois golfers like Jeffrey Kallister have their choice of top-tier Chicagoland golf courses, one has consistently ranked at the top of the charts. Developed by course architects Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor, the Chicago Golf Club is a parkland course with a reputation as one of the nation’s most exclusive clubs.
Among the oldest courses in the United States, the Chicago Golf Club has a unique background. Approaching the turn of the century, the city was preparing for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, better known today as the Chicago World’s Fair. The city underwent extensive preparations in anticipation of an influx of international tourists, including innovative business leaders and distinguished dignitaries. With so many important visitors on the horizon, event organizers believed that Chicago needed to provide its VIPs with a top golfing experience.
C.B. Macdonald originally designed the course at Belmont, where the country club opened in 1892, but the course moved to Wheaton in 1894 and has remained there to this day. Since that time, the course has influenced American golf in several ways. For starters, many golf historians credit the Chicago Golf Club as the first 18-hole course in America. In 1897, it became the first course outside of the Northeast to host a US Open.
In designing the course, Macdonald employed bent-grass greens for the first time. Perhaps most significantly, the Chicago Golf Club numbered among the five founding members of the American Golf Association, known today as the United States Golf Association, or USGA. Together with the Newport Country Club (Rhode Island), Shinnecock Hills Golf Club (New York), St. Andrew’s Golf Club (also in New York), and The Country Club (Massachusetts), Chicago has helped shape the landscape of golf in America for well over a century.
Macdonald’s initial design remained in play for more than two decades, with only a few minor modifications. With more local and national competition popping up every year, the club made several efforts to update and modernize the course. By 1922, the owners deemed the layout antiquated, and Seth Raynor, Macdonald’s protégé, gained the club’s support in remodeling the entire course, a project on which he collaborated with Macdonald.
In addition to the 1897 US Open, the Chicago Golf Club hosted championships such as the US Amateur and the Walker Cup. Bobby Jones played one of the finest rounds of golf on record in 1928, finishing the course in 66 strokes en route to a dominating 11-1 US victory in the Walker Cup, which returned to the Chicago Golf Club in 2005.
While the course consistently ranks highly among the best golf destinations in Illinois, it also ranks as one of the state’s most exclusive. This means local or visiting golfers may need to plan on playing some of the state’s top-rated public courses instead, which include Cog Hill in Lemont, The Highlands of Elgin, and TPC Deere Run in Silvis, to name only a few.
