Grant Park: The Happy Accident

Municipal courses are the backbone of golf in America, playing the vital role of bringing the game to the masses. Many get a bad rap, though, for being simple, utilitarian tracks designed to shuttle locals around in somewhere between 4 and 6 hours. Thankfully, Milwaukee breaks from this mold. Early city planners had the foresight to grow the city around its parks, with golf seen as an asset instead of an afterthought. As a result, some of the city’s best land was preserved for the game. Today, 13 county parks include a golf course, the most per capita in the country.

It was at Milwaukee’s munis that I cut my teeth as a junior, often getting dropped off at Brown Deer at dawn and rounding out foursomes with strangers until dark - an experience I credit helping my social anxiety as much as my golf game. Though I mostly kept to the north side, there was always something special about making the trek to South Milwaukee to play Grant Park. Maybe it was the setting - a quirky course situated right on the lake and framed by one of the city’s quainter neighborhoods - or maybe it was from hearing the stories from my dad about playing there when he lived on the south side (I still can’t believe he had to deal with a tree in the middle of the 3rd fairway). Whatever the reason, I always loved a round at Grant.

Now that I have a little understanding of golf course architecture, I wanted to try to find an answer. Grant’s design ranges from unconventional to downright weird, so why does it work so well?

Looking through the green, things don’t look promising. Grant’s holes play through narrow corridors of mature trees which have encroached over the years to the point of infamously making the par-3 7th play as a dogleg. Though this could be a major strike for those in the “width and angles” crowd like myself, at 5,200 yards, there’s thankfully little need to be taking off headcovers. The terrain is also a dead end. Though mildly interesting, it lacks anything truly notable.

By process of elimination, then, that leaves us with the greens. We’re all familiar with the typical muni green: a gently back-to-front pitched circle at fairway grade. Maybe if you’re lucky you get an oval sprinkled in or a bunker short-right. The first at Grant follows the stereotype, but things quickly improve into what I argue is the best set of greens in the park system. The greens that do tilt back-to-front (2, 4, 5, 9, 10) do so aggressively to the point of making any chip above the hole nerve-wrenching. Many others (6, 7, 11, 17) feature sharp tiers feet apart in elevation. Others still (12, 18) actually slope severely front-to-back - a rarity in the muni realm. Though some have been redone over the years, many of George Hansen’s original greensites from 1920 remain, with the Pringle-shaped 12th the most dramatic of the bunch - any approach longer than a wedge is nearly guaranteed to rocket off the back.

The surprising severity of Grant’s greens reveals the true strategy of the course is not in playing angles, but rather finding the best yardage for approaches. With so many par 4’s being drivable, players must evaluate the risk of pushing the ball near the green and having a severely difficult chip, or laying back to have a full shot approach. A prime example of this strategy is the 11th, whose green features a lower front tier that plays some 4 feet below the back portion which plummets off on all sides. A well struck shot could get near the green, but any less than perfect chip results in a ball careening down punishing slopes. The prudent play - and the one I often take - is to lay back with a mid iron to allow for a full wedge into the green.

I doubt Grant’s current strategy is what Hansen intended with his 1920 routing - few could have predicted the change in playing style that would come with golf’s tech revolutions - so I’m inclined to believe modern-day Grant is a bit of a happy accident. The combination of a mature, short, and immensely unconventional design paired with some of the area’s most severe greens is a recipe many would peg for a disaster, but at Grant it just seems to work. Sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good…