The most unusual finish in golf? This club might have it

It’s a cold, rainy October Monday in St. Paul. Not ideal for golf but perfect for exploration. I’m doing both.

I plop my bag on the 14th tee at Town & Country Club, the oldest golf course in Minnesota. Hard up against the Mississippi River, it features rolling hills and a magnificent view of the Minneapolis skyline, but I’m here specifically to check out this five-hole finale, which is anything but conventional.

The par-3 14th is the start of one of the most unusual closing stretches in the country. Here, three par 5s are played back to back to back, and they are bookended by a pair of par 3s. Battle through the first 13 holes at Town & Country, and a 3-5-5-5-3 finish awaits.

Pretty cool, right? They think so, too.

“The holes really fit the strange typography, because it is a strange typography,” says architect Jeff Mingay, who worked with long-time superintendent Bill Larson to complete a recent restoration of the golf course. “It’s a tight site. It’s got severe ravines and elevation changes. It kind of warms my heart in the way that it’s like, OK, these are the holes that fit here. We really don’t care about similar par on back-to-back holes, we don’t care about total par, we don’t care about balancing the nines. We just have this really dramatic site and here’s where the holes work.”

Town & Country is one of the 20 oldest courses in North America. It opened in 1893 with six holes marked by tomato cans and fishing poles. A few years later it evolved to nine holes and, after purchasing more acreage, the club expanded to 18 holes in 1907. The current routing has been in place since 1920. The course has undergone minor tweaks over the past century, although the biggest and most recent change was completed in May 2025, when Larson and Mingay put the finishing touches on Town & Country’s Golf Course Enhancement Project.

Today’s course is arguably the best version of Town & Country, a private club with a membership of about 575. It’s set in an urban yet scenic setting with short walks from tee to green. It’s not long, there’s minimal water hazards, and fast greens are the biggest defense. It’s never been regrassed and has over 30 different types of grass species — including bentgrass from Scotland — giving it unique colorations on fairways and greens that Larson says adds character. A ravine cuts through the property, separating the front and back nines and helping to produce 80 feet of elevation change.

The evolution to this version started years ago, when Larson was on vacation in Canada and stopped by Victoria Golf Club, which is more than a century old, just like Town & Country. Larson loved how Mingay resurrected an old-school look that was authentic to its heritage. He thought Town & Country could benefit from a similar update, so he contacted Mingay and they got to work in 2016. At first it was small projects, chipping away at restoring bunkers or greens every spring and fall for five years; “screwing around,” as Mingay puts it.

But members liked the changes and were curious about what else Mingay could do with the property. He came up with a plan, and in 2024 Mingay and Larson dug in. Every hole on the property was touched as they returned the course to its original architectural intent while also sustaining it for the future.

A big part of the process was tree removal, which started slowly by taking out ones that were either harming the agronomy (no sun getting to the grass), complicating course maintenance or hurting playability (about 150 were also taken out in 2012 due to the Emerald ash borer, a destructive beetle). As work progressed, wonderful sightlines opened up. The aesthetic of the course is far different than years ago, when choked-out trees made most holes feel like separate entities and masked the dramatic typography. Now it’s open with long views that extend beyond the property to downtown Minneapolis, the Lake Street Bridge, the Mississippi River and the bustling city.

Some members were resistant to the tree removal but most came around.

“All of a sudden you go, ‘Wow, look at that view,’” says Larson, who recently retired after 36 years at Town & Country. “Members really got used to it and saw that the long views are important. The removal really opened everyone’s eyes, and then you get an architect like Jeff, who is really good at restoring old golf courses. He comes out here and goes, ‘Wow, these views are incredible.’”

(A minor but interesting subplot to all of this: In 2022, St. Thomas, a private, Catholic university just a few blocks down the road, offered $61.4 million to buy the 96-acre golf course — not the clubhouse or pool — to build a new hockey arena as well as baseball and softball fields. After speaking with members, the club’s board of directors unanimously rejected the offer.)

The restoration was tricky — like putting together a 100-year-old puzzle, Mingay says — due to all of the minor course changes that added up over several decades.

“What we tried to do was figure out all the best features and all the best functional elements of the golf course throughout history that are going to work best today and hopefully moving forward for the long term,” says Mingay, who while in Minnesota also spent time leading a restoration at Minneapolis Golf Club. “We tried to make it all feel like it fits cohesively. That’s what made the project so interesting, which was trying to take all these really good elements from over an 80-year period and still trying to connect the dots in terms of how it all worked stylistically.”

One thing that didn’t change with the restoration? That epic finish.

TOWN & COUNTRY ISN’T THE ONLY COURSE that boasts an unconventional stretch of holes. Cypress Point has back-to-back par 5s and par 3s, and Tom Doak’s Pacific Dunes has back-to-back par 3s playing along the Pacific (both are among the four par 3s on the back nine). Inwood Country Club in New York has three straight par 5s on the front side. Osaka Golf Club in Japan finishes 3-5-3-5-3. And “The Other Course” at Scottsdale National never has a hole with the same par repeated.

How important is a routing to a golf course? And what’s the difference between a good one and a gimmicky one? Mingay says it’s hard to explain. It’s more like a feeling.

“There’s a flow to a really good routing where as you are walking as a golfer from tee to green, from the green to the next tee, it feels like that’s the way you should be walking around that particular property,” Mingay says. “And I think Town & Country 100 percent fits that description.”

Few, if any, routings in the United States finish like Town & Country. And while the five-hole stretch is the star, it’s important to know what comes before it to properly tee up this finish.

The course opens with a short par 4 and is followed by back-to-back par 3s — see, more unconventional goodness — a par 5 and, arguably one of the most improved holes, the par-4 5th that plays down into the ravine and back uphill. Mingay softened the elevation change, restored the ridge line and created a punchbowl green to create a hole that looks like it was dropped in from east Scotland. The 6th, the hardest hole on the course, goes down and up the same ravine and calls for a blind shot into the green, and Nos. 7-10 are all par 4s that provide their own challenges. (Ten, despite not being the subject of this story, is so good it’s worthy of at least one sentence, so here it is, about the wide, forgiving fairway that leads to a narrow and elevated green pushed up on the side of a hill.)

Eleven is a par 3 where a miss right is dubbed “The Valley of 5.” Twelve is a par 5, which brings us to 13, an important appetizer before the closing stretch. That’s because the par-4 13th is just 303 yards from the back tees, and while there’s some trouble looming, this is a birdie hole (especially since they removed a pesky tree down the center and replaced it with a top-shot bunker). An important birdie, too, since you are likely to give a stroke back on the long par-3 14th that kicks off our five-hole headliner.

Fourteen is a 234-yard par 3 that looks even tougher thanks to the top-shot bunkers Mingay added. He says this hole used to look like a cemetery with just grass tee to green but added these bunkers to decorate the foreground with a strong visual element. Mission accomplished. There’s an easy 50 yards of fairway in front of the green, but it doesn’t look like it.

Fourteen is the most difficult hole of the closing five and gives way to a more forgiving trio of three straight par 5s that run parallel to each other with the fairways adjoined at certain points, a new post-renovation aesthetic that removed rough and trees.

“It feels more like a landscape for golf now instead of three separate holes,” Mingay says. “Just a big area of contours and slopes mowed short. I just love that whole look of a big landscape for golf instead of sending people through corridors, and I think that became a really unique feature of that back nine.”

On 15, a good drive puts you in position to go for the green in two and sets up one of the most fun, lip-licking swings of the day. It’s a blind shot into a green set down into a valley, a total drop of about 60 feet that begins 90 yards away from the putting surface. If going for the green in two, the common play is to land your ball on that downslope on the left side of the fairway and let it trickle and ride the left-to-right angle of the fairway and green. The only bad thing about the 15th is you have to wait 17 holes to play it again.

On 16th, you’ll need to avoid a few of the remaining pesky trees left and right of the fairway that might prevent you from going for it in two. The terrain flows downhill as you get closer to the green, although not nearly as extreme as the 15th. There are no bunkers around this green but it’s still one of the most difficult areas to get up-and-down from on the course.

“If you look at the routing on a scorecard those par 5s look just straight,” Larson says, “but they are totally different holes.”

The 17th — Larson’s favorite — is the truest three-shot par 5 among the trio. A blind tee shot must avoid bunkers left and a second shot has to avoid bunkers right. The best part of the hole might be on the green, where you are perched up high and can see the Minneapolis skyline shine in the background.

The par-3 18th finisher is 170 yards and downhill. With a green that slopes severely from back to front, you can’t miss long. To the right of the green are Adirondack chairs. They are vacant when I play, but on most days it’s a dreamy spot to take in the finale of this unique finish. Here at Town & Country, where the new infuses with the old, there’s a lot to sit and savor.

Josh Berhow welcomes your comments at joshua_berhow@golf.com.