Pine Valley Golf Club Review

George Crump was a Philadelphia hotelier with no design experience when he and a group of amateurs bought 184 acres of sandy scrub in the pine barrens in 1913. He sold his hotel, pulled 22,000 stumps and set rules nobody had tried before: no two holes parallel, no more than two in a row heading the same way, and no hole visible from another. Harry Colt approved the routing, fourteen holes were in play by 1916, and Crump died in 1918 with the course unfinished. It opened officially in 1919 and the last holes were completed in 1922.

What he left is the purest expression of penal golf anywhere. Every fairway is an island in a sea of sand, scrub and pine, and nearly every approach demands a carry, most famously over Hell's Half Acre, the sandy waste that crosses the par five 7th. The par threes are widely held to be the finest set in golf, and the long 15th begins with a drive across a lake. The club once offered first time visitors a standing bet that they would not break 80; Arnold Palmer, about to be married and short of money, collected on every one of them with a 68 in 1954.

Conditioning is excellent, and the pines frame each hole in isolation, so the round plays as eighteen separate private worlds. GOLF Magazine ranked it first in the world in 2012, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2023, and Golf Digest ranks it first in America.

The value grade is not a judgement on quality. Membership is by invitation, guests must be invited and accompanied by a member, and the public sees the grounds on one day a year, at the Crump Cup in late September.