The Honors Course - Tennessee, U.S.A.

The Honors Course in the town of Ooltewah, just north of Chattanooga, was developed by Jack Lupton to honor the spirit of amateur golf. Lupton selected as his designers Pete and Alice Dye, who were themselves top-notch amateur golfers, Pete having won the 1958 Indiana State Amateur while Alice won the Indiana Women's Amateur seven times. Opened in 1983, the course is exceptionally tranquil, with softly sculpted, natural fairways winding around two lakes and through groves of southern red oak, shagbark hickory, pines, and dogwoods in an isolated valley beneath the ridge of White Oak Mountain. A distinguishing feature of the Honors Course is the striking array of specimen grasses planted by David Stone, the green keeper at the course since its inception. When Stone first accepted the position, he undertook a comprehensive study of the native grasses in the Chattanooga Valley, and began introducing them around the fairways and bunkers. The result is a rich medley of purple, brown, beige, and tan fescues and sedges.

The Homestead Resort - Virginia, U.S.A.

The Cascades Course at The Homestead Resort in Hot Springs is the Allegheny Mountain masterpiece of William Flynn, the great Philadelphia golf course architect of the golden era of design. Opened in 1923, the course's strength is how seamlessly the narrow, sloping fairways are contoured through the valley floor, surrounded by the dense overgrowth of white and red oaks, red, sugar, and silver maples, white pines, and Norway spruce. A mountain stream comes into play on many of the holes, particularly the final three. The course finishes with a 192-yard par-three over the stream, with the green overlooking the clubhouse that was once the summer home of New York Stock Exchange trader Jakey Rubino. In 1967, Catherine LaCoste, the daughter of French tennis star Rene "the Crocodile" LaCoste, won the U.S. Women's Open at the Cascades as a 20-year-old amateur, the only amateur ever to win the championship. The resort has two other Courses: The Old Course is a 1913 Donald Ross design and the Lower Cascades Course is a Robert Trent Jones design from 1963.