If you've watched any professional golf on television over the past four decades, you've heard the letters "TPC" attached to a course name. TPC Sawgrass. TPC Scottsdale. TPC Harding Park. TPC stands for Tournament Players Club — a network of golf courses owned, operated, and licensed by the PGA Tour. The branding is everywhere in the sport, but most travelling golfers don't fully understand what it means, where it came from, or why it should matter to them when planning a trip.
The story behind TPC is one of the shrewdest business moves in the history of sport. It reshaped the economics of professional golf, created a network of courses that the public can actually play, and pioneered a design philosophy that remains divisive among architecture enthusiasts to this day.
Today, the TPC network comprises 30 properties across three countries — the United States, Canada, and Mexico — plus the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Here's what you need to know.
For most of its history, the PGA Tour operated as a travelling circus. Each week, the Tour would pitch up at a different private club, stage a tournament, and move on. The host club controlled the course setup, the infrastructure, the hospitality, and the revenue. The Tour was a well-known guest renting somebody else's living room.
By the late 1970s, that arrangement was breaking down. Spectator experiences at many venues were poor — cramped viewing corridors, limited sightlines, zero infrastructure for grandstands or broadcast equipment. Private clubs weren't designed for crowds of 30,000 or more. And the Tour had almost no control over the commercial revenue being generated at its own events.
PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman saw the solution: the Tour needed to build and own its own courses. It was a radical idea — a professional sports league constructing its own stadiums. In American football or baseball, that model was well established. In golf, nobody had attempted it.
Beman enlisted architect Pete Dye, and in 1980, they opened TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. It would become the permanent home of The Players Championship and, in time, one of the most recognisable golf courses on earth.
The signature concept behind TPC courses is what Beman and Dye termed "stadium golf." The premise was straightforward: design the course so that spectators can actually see what's happening. In practice, that meant sculpting enormous mounds around greens and along key fairway corridors, creating natural amphitheatres where thousands of fans could watch the action from elevated vantage points.
At Sawgrass, Dye committed fully. The course was carved from flat Florida swampland, with earth-moving equipment fabricating elevation changes the terrain never provided naturally. Waste bunkers, railway sleeper walls, bulkheaded lakes, and the now-iconic island green par-3 17th hole were all part of a layout that felt like nothing else in American golf.
Tour professionals initially loathed it. The original routing was brutally penal, with water swallowing balls on seemingly every hole. J.C. Snead famously described the course as "90% horse manure and 10% luck." But Beman hadn't built Sawgrass to please the players. He'd built it for fans, for television cameras, and for the Tour's financial independence.
The design philosophy has always split opinion. The weaker TPC courses feel very much manufactured — rows of uniform berms that bear no relationship to the landscape, constructed purely to give galleries somewhere to stand. That distinction matters if you care about golf course architecture, and it explains why some TPC courses rank among the best in their state while others go unranked entirely.
Here's the part that's most relevant if you're building a trip itinerary: a significant portion of TPC courses are open for public play. Unlike the storied private clubs that host major championships, the TPC network was designed with accessibility at its core.
Of the 30 TPC properties, 14 are resort or daily-fee courses where you can book a tee time and pay a green fee without any membership. These include the flagship venues — TPC Sawgrass, TPC Scottsdale, TPC San Antonio, TPC Harding Park, TPC Las Vegas, TPC Louisiana, and TPC Dorado Beach, among them. The remaining 16 are private clubs, including notable tournament venues like TPC Southwind, TPC River Highlands, TPC Craig Ranch, and TPC Boston, where access is restricted to members and their guests.
Just under half the network is genuinely accessible to travelling golfers, but that still represents a rare opportunity in professional golf — if you want to play a course where Tour events take place, TPC's pay-and-play venues are often your best, and sometimes your only, realistic option.
The trade-off is price. Green fees at flagship TPC courses regularly sit between $300 and $500, sometimes considerably more during peak season. You're paying for the brand, the conditioning, and the bragging rights. Whether that represents value depends on what you want from a round of golf.
Conditioning across the network is consistently strong. Because TPC courses are PGA Tour-owned, they're maintained to professional standards year-round rather than being polished for one event week per year. Greens are quick, fairways are tight, bunkers are pristine. If immaculate course conditioning is a priority for you, TPC venues will rarely let you down.
We've reviewed and ranked every TPC course in the network. These are the five that stand above the rest; whether they are worth a green fee is up to you.
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida
The flagship of the entire network and the course that started it all. Home of The Players Championship — which carries the largest purse on the PGA Tour outside the four majors — Sawgrass is the definitive TPC experience. The island green 17th is the single most televised hole in professional golf, and regardless of what you think about it architecturally, standing on that tee with a wedge in your hand is one of the great bucket-list moments in the game.
Pete Dye softened the routing significantly after its brutal early years, and the course has matured beautifully through the Florida wetlands. The conditioning is immaculate, the practice facilities are world-class, and the entire experience — from check-in to the 18th green — is polished in a way that justifies the premium green fee. Playing Sawgrass feels like an event. That's exactly what it was designed to be.
Norton, Massachusetts
A Gil Hanse design that hosted the Dell Technologies Championship (formerly the Deutsche Bank Championship) for over a decade as part of the FedEx Cup Playoffs. It's worth noting that TPC Boston operates as a private club, so access is limited to members and their guests — but it earns its place on this list on the strength of the design alone. TPC Boston stands apart from most courses in the network because of Hanse's reputation as one of the most respected modern architects in the game — his portfolio includes Merion's restoration and the Olympic Course in Rio.
The routing moves through mature New England woodland with subtle, strategic bunkering and green complexes that reward creativity. It's a course that feels more considered than many TPC venues — less reliant on the stadium mounding formula and more focused on the quality of the golf itself. For golfers who appreciate design substance alongside Tour pedigree, Boston is a standout.
Berthoud, Colorado
One of the newer additions to the TPC network, TPC Colorado was designed by Art Schaupeter and sits against the dramatic backdrop of the Rocky Mountain Front Range. The course hosted the Korn Ferry Tour's TPC Colorado Championship and offers something that many TPC courses lack: a genuine sense of place. The mountain views are spectacular, the layout uses the rolling terrain intelligently, and the conditioning meets the standard you'd expect from the brand.
It's a course that demonstrates what the TPC model looks like when it embraces natural landscape rather than imposing manufactured features onto flat ground. For golfers passing through Colorado, it's a compelling option that many overlook.
San Antonio, Texas
Home of the Valero Texas Open, which holds the distinction of being the longest-running event on the PGA Tour at the same course. The Oaks Course, designed by Greg Norman with Sergio Garcia's input, threads through the Texas Hill Country landscape of live oaks and native grasses, with the rock outcroppings and elevation changes giving the layout a character that feels authentically Texan.
The resort complex at JW Marriott San Antonio also houses the Canyons Course (a separate TPC-branded layout by Pete Dye), making it a strong multi-round destination. The Oaks is the stronger of the two designs and earns its place among the top TPC courses for its combination of tournament pedigree, natural setting, and accessibility as a resort course.
San Francisco, California
If there's one TPC course that transcends the brand entirely, it's Harding Park. Originally built as a municipal course in the 1920s, it was renovated and brought into the TPC fold, and has since hosted the PGA Championship, the WGC-Match Play, and the Presidents Cup. Set among towering Monterey cypress trees along the shores of Lake Merced, it possesses a sense of history and atmosphere that purpose-built TPC courses simply cannot replicate.
The fact that it remains a public course in a major American city — one that has hosted a major championship — makes it almost unique in the sport. It barely feels like a "TPC course" in the traditional sense, and that's precisely what makes it special. The architecture predates the stadium golf era by half a century, and the Monterey cypress corridors give it a gravitas that no amount of manufactured mounding could create.
Several TPC courses outside our top 5 deserve mention for travelling golfers.
TPC Scottsdale's Stadium Course hosts the WM Phoenix Open and its infamous par-3 16th hole stadium — the most raucous atmosphere in professional golf.
TPC River Highlands hosts the Travellers Championship and features one of the best finishing stretches on Tour.
TPC Southwind is home to the FedEx St. Jude Invitational — the PGA Tour's only private club in Tennessee.
TPC Louisiana and TPC Deere Run are strong options that often fly under the radar.
The TPC network extends beyond the continental U.S. into two additional countries and one U.S. territory. In Puerto Rico, TPC Dorado Beach is a 54-hole resort complex with the East Course ranked #1 on the island.
In Mexico, TPC Danzante Bay in Loreto, Baja California Sur is ranked #17 nationally — a stunning coastal layout in one of the country's most beautiful settings.
In Canada, TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley offers three courses (Hoot, Heathlands, and North), all ranked within the Canadian top 80 and all sharing the same Alton, Ontario facility.
The TPC network deserves credit for something that often gets overlooked: access to professional-calibre golf courses used for tournament play. Before TPC, if you wanted to play a course where Tour events took place, your options were virtually nonexistent. TPC created a pathway for everyday golfers to experience tournament conditions/
The business model was visionary. The PGA Tour transformed itself from an organisation dependent on the goodwill of private clubs into a property portfolio generating year-round revenue through green fees, memberships, hospitality, and event hosting. It gave the Tour financial independence and brand control that it simply didn't have before.
The TPC name implies a certain standard, but the network includes everything from world-class tournament venues to facilities that are essentially well-maintained daily-fee courses carrying a premium marque. Not every TPC course hosts or was ever intended to host a Tour event.
From an architectural standpoint, the ‘stadium’ build that defines most TPC designs can feel formulaic — manufactured berms that serve no strategic purpose and have no relationship to the natural landscape.
If a TPC course falls on your travel route, it may be worth considering. Our top 5 (Sawgrass, Boston, Colorado, San Antonio Oaks, and Harding Park) offer experiences that are difficult to replicate elsewhere: exceptional conditioning, memorable holes, and the chance to walk fairways you've watched on television.
For the remaining TPC courses, weigh the green fee against what else is available in that market. In some cases, you'll find that a similarly priced course without the TPC badge offers a more interesting, more characterful round of golf.
What Deane Beman started in 1980 was more than a golf course. It was a business model that altered an entire sport. Whether or not every TPC venue lives up to the ambition of that original vision, the concept itself remains one of the most consequential innovations in the modern game.
See our TPC Ranking, you would actually want to play.
