Flint Golf Club Course Review
Flint Golf Club
Grade: A+
Teacher’s Comments: A classic beauty
In the summer of 2024, Flint Golf Club had several days on which they invited the general public to play the private club’s course for a very reasonable rate. Seizing the opportunity, I called and made a midweek tee time. I am so glad I did.
Flint Golf Club is a Willie Park, Jr. design dating to 1919. Park was a Scottish professional who twice won the Open Championship (1887, 1889) and has more than 170 course designs to his credit in the UK, Europe, the US and Canada. Among his better-known designs are Olympia Fields, New Haven Country Club, Sylvania Country Club, Battle Creek Country Club and Red Run in Royal Oak, Michigan.
The Flint Golf Club was built for the city’s rising class of wealthy automobile entrepreneurs. Among the founding members were J. Dallas Dort (cofounder of Durand-Dort Carriage), William Durant (cofounder of GM, Chevrolet and Frigidaire), Walter P. Chrysler (yes, that Chrysler), Albert Champion (spark plugs), Charles Nash (President of GM and Founder of Nash Motors), and Harry Bassett (President of Buick). The complete list is a Who’s Who of automotive pioneers.
The course that Park built for the automotive magnates is routed as a wheel within a wheel. The “front nine” is the inner wheel, and every tee is to the left of the preceding green. The “back nine” is the outer wheel, with every tee positioned to the right of the preceding green.
It is all very clever and while the holes are not literally laid out in a circle — indeed, many of the holes actually run parallel — it works in a metaphorical sense.
As one would expect from a course of this vintage, Flint Golf Club is a parklands design, with light scatterings of trees between holes. The inner wheel is mostly flat, while the outer is hilly. I suspect, though, that the original design was mostly treeless. The ones on the course are relatively young.
While there are just three real doglegs, a majority have enough bend to favor a shot to the left or right side of the fairway for an ideal approach. A score of fairway bunkers threaten the sides of the fairways. On the sixth, a pair of bunkers pinch the fairway from both sides. At Flint Golf Club strategy dictates that you watch how far your shot runs out.
Most of the holes have open fronts, offering a variety of approach style shots. One could lob an aproach in, or, as I prefer to do, try to land a little short and let the ball roll up onto the green. On couses of this vintage, I have found that you can generally not go wrong by being below the hole.
The green-side bunkers are notable for their sheer quantity. Every hole had at least two, generally to pinch the open approach. Hole six, however, had an insane number of bunkers around the green, in addition to the two fairway bunkers threatening the sides. The green was almost on an island of sand.
My favorite hole at Flint Golf Club was actually the first. It’s a 527-yard dogleg right par five. On the tee shot, the drive should favor the left a little, but not so much that the bunker on the left comes into play There’s also a fairway bunker on the right to catch short slices.
The bend comes roughly halfway down the hole, so a shot on the right side may very well leave nothing but a short layup to get back the left, and then a longer shot into the green.
Once past the bend, it’s a relatively straight shot into a slightly raised, open front green. There’s a bunker on the left that really shouldn’t come into play, unless a player overcooks a draw.
I thought another great hole was the seventh. This long par four bends to the left just past a large bunker on the right then dips slightly downhill to the green. The bunker offers a nice aiming point, for past that, the fairway is out of sight.
Flint Golf Club has numerical tees (1-4) rather than colors. From the number 1 tees, it comes in at 6, 694 yards with a par of 72.
| Tees | Yardage | Slope | Rating |
| 1 | 6, 694 | 133 | 72.6 |
| 2 | 6, 461 | M 131 W 140 | M 71.7 W 77.3 |
| 3 | 5, 888 | M 122 W 135 | M 69.3 W 74.8 |
| 3/4 | 5, 257 | M 116 W 128 | M 65.7 W 71.3 |
| 4 | 4, 805 | M 111 W 122 | M 63.9 W 68.6 |
It does not seem so at first glance, but Flint Golf Club has some teeth.
Conditions on the day I played were as one would expect from a country club. The greens were smooth, the fairways completely grown in and tee boxes in good shape, in spite of it being toward the end of the season.
If you get the opportunity to play Flint Golf Club, jump at it. It is an enjoyable classic. I am certainly going to look for another opportunity to tee it up there.
The Flint Golf Club golf course review was first published January 21, 2025 from notes and photos taken on a round played during the 2024 season. For a list of all of GolfBlogger’s Michigan golf course reviews, follow the link.
A photo tour of Flint Golf Club follows:
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