Cardinal Golf Club Review

Cardinal is what a public golf club looks like when it is run by people who like golfers. The property in Kettleby stacks multiple courses around a busy clubhouse, and the flagship eighteen is the reason to make the drive up Highway 400: a mature par 72 across the flat, fertile edge of the Holland Marsh, framed by windbreak pines, with water in play just often enough to keep the driver honest.

Nothing in the routing will make an architecture nerd reach for a notebook, and the flatness caps the drama, but the course is wide, walkable, fairly bunkered and kept in dependable shape from thaw to snow. What elevates the place is the operation. Tee sheets move on time, twilight and shoulder-season rates are genuinely cheap, the range is good, and a foursome of mixed handicaps all leave happy. The GTA is short on golf this unpretentious. Cardinal fills the gap eighteen holes at a time and earns its grade on reliability.