New Jersey is home to the course many architects and ranking panels still call the best in the world. Pine Valley Golf Club, opened in 1913 to George Crump and H.S. Colt's vision, is a sandy, penal, privately guarded masterpiece in the pines—narrow fairways, waste areas, and greens that have influenced a century of design. Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, a Tillinghast Upper and Lower complex, has hosted U.S. Opens and PGA Championships in volume few clubs can match. Liberty National in Jersey City frames the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty from a reclaimed waterfront, a 21st-century counterpoint to the state's Golden Age interior.
The PGA Tour's relationship with New Jersey has included Liberty National and Bedminster-area events; the deeper culture is Met section amateur golf, packed Shore courses in summer, and a private-club density in the northern suburbs that rivals any American metro. Public golf is a battle for tee times. The Shore in July is a different sport from a still October morning at a pine-belt club.
New Jersey golfers live in the shadow of New York and Philadelphia and have a résumé that needs neither. Charity weeks are corporate and hospital-heavy. The local signature is Pine Valley's myth and Baltusrol's major-championship ledger, plus a Shore scramble that raises money with the Atlantic in the air. For a state typed by turnpikes, the golf is intimate, sandy, and historically first-rate.