Winged Foot Golf Club
Designed by A. W. Tillinghast
History
The story begins not in Mamaroneck but in Manhattan, where a group of New York Athletic Club members found themselves squeezed for space and patience alike, their home grounds no longer sufficient for a membership hungry for golf. In 1921, under the leadership of club president John Reid Jr., that appetite led them north to Westchester County, where they acquired roughly 280 acres of rolling farmland and woodlots. The name they chose paid tribute to the winged foot emblem of the Athletic Club itself — a small detail that has outlived every other trace of that original affiliation.
To design the grounds, the club turned to A. W. Tillinghast, then at the height of his career and already trusted with commissions that would define American golf architecture for a generation. Tillinghast’s response was to build not one course but two, laying out the West and East courses simultaneously, completed together in 1923. He shaped his holes into terrain marked by hardwood stands and quiet elevation changes, giving the West Course in particular a severity that would soon draw the attention of the sport’s governing bodies. Winged Foot was, from its earliest seasons, conceived as a proving ground — a private retreat, yes, but one built with championship ambition stitched into its routing.
That ambition bore out quickly. The West Course hosted its first U.S. Open in 1929, won by Bobby Jones in a playoff, and the club has returned to national prominence again and again in the decades since — through Opens in 1959, 1974, 1984, 2006, and 2020, along with PGA Championships and Walker Cups along the way. The greens committee has, over the years, entrusted restoration work to architects including Gil Hanse, whose early-2000s efforts on the West Course aimed to recover bunker lines and contours closer to Tillinghast’s original hand, stripping away decades of incremental drift. Winged Foot remains a private club to this day, its membership rolls modest by design, its reputation built almost entirely on what has unfolded on its two Tillinghast courses since that first shovel went into Westchester soil.
Playing Notes
Bring your best iron game and leave your ego at the range. Both the East and West courses at Winged Foot demand precision approach shots into small, tilted greens guarded by deep, steep-faced bunkers positioned to catch anything slightly off-line — miss in the wrong spot and you're looking at a bogey just to get up and down. The greens themselves run fast and are subtly contoured enough that reading them correctly matters as much as hitting them. Fairways are tighter than they look from the tee, and the rough surrounding them is grown thick enough to make recovery shots a genuine test of judgment rather than a formality. This is a walking course in spirit — hilly in stretches but manageable on foot — and carts are available if you'd rather save your legs for your swing. Come prepared to control your ball flight in the wind that moves through the more exposed holes, and don't expect to overpower your way to a good score; shot-shaping and a steady short game will get you further here than length off the tee.