When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he immediately made clear he wanted only its most “hardcore” employees to stay on and work for him at X. His idea of hardcore: Work all day, sleep at work, wake up and do it all over again the next day.
That’s sort of what it was like to take a driving tour of Nebraska’s best public-access golf courses, which a couple writers and a few friends did last summer. Our routine: Play a course, drive for hours, check in to a motel then do it again the next day, for a week.
After many hours in a car, I can attest that the great state of Nebraska is, in fact, a giant inland links golf course in the making, its sand-based soil and wind-sculpted dunes just waiting to be discovered. Which is exactly what Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw did in 1994 when they designed the uber-private Sand Hills Golf Club, No. 11 on Golf.com’s “Top 100 in the World” list. Coore and Crenshaw started it all and others followed.
The half-dozen best public courses we hit in Nebraska – Landmand, Tatanka, Dismal River’s Red and White Courses, and The Prairie Dunes Club’s Pines and Dunes Courses – all share the main traits that made Sand Hills great: sandy soil, elevation changes, dunes and wind.
Here’s why you should go to Nebraska:
Landmand is in the northeast corner of the state, near Sioux City, Iowa, and is the closest course to Chicago on our itinerary – a mere 71⁄2 hours not counting pit stops.
If you’ve heard of Landmand, you probably read a news story about how they sold all 11,000 of their 2024 tee times in just three hours when their online tee sheet opened on Dec. 31, 2023. Landmand currently is the newest bright shiny thing in golf.
Named Golf Digest’s “Best New Public Course” in 2022, Landmand was designed by Tennessee golf course designers Rob Collins and Tad King, the team behind Sweetens Cove, a quirky nine-hole course in Pittsburg, Tennessee, near Chattanooga. On a scale of 1 to 10, Sweetens Cove is an 11 for extreme green complexes: wildly contoured greens and greens that can funnel shots and even wayward putts into bunkers – that sort of thing. More
