Southern Hills Country Club

A Perry Maxwell masterpiece in the rolling hills of Tulsa, Southern Hills Country Club has hosted more PGA Championships than any other course. Restored to Maxwell's original vision by Gil Hanse in 2019, the Championship Course is a notably tested venues in major championship golf. The property also includes the West Nine, a 9-hole par-35 layout designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw in 1992 on the site of the club's former polo field.

Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, stands as among the celebrated and historically significant private golf clubs in America — a Perry Maxwell design from 1936 that has hosted more major championships than any other Oklahoma course, including five PGA Championships (the most any course has hosted) and three U.S. Opens, earning its place among the greatest golf courses in the United States. The club's founding story is one of perseverance against extraordinary odds. In January 1935, at the depths of the Great Depression, with Oklahoma reeling from weak oil prices and the Dust Bowl that was turning the Great Plains into a wasteland, Bill Warren and Cecil Canary rallied Tulsa's business community around the vision of a championship golf course that would bring great events to the city. On January 14, 1935 — one day before the deadline — a letter of acceptance confirmed that 140 shares of the new Southern Hills Corporation had been sold at $1,000 per share, totaling $140,000, enough to begin building Perry Maxwell's masterwork.

The land was donated by Waite Phillips, a multimillionaire oilman whose philanthropic vision helped bring one of America's greatest golf courses to the hills south of Tulsa. Perry Maxwell, already recognized as the Father of Oklahoma Golf through his foundational work at Dornick Hills, Southern Hills represented his most ambitious and acclaimed design — a championship test of 7,556 yards (as set up for the 2022 PGA Championship) that has challenged the finest players in the world across eight decades of major championship competition. Opening day for the golf course was May 23, 1936, when 29 members teed off for the first time on Maxwell's new creation. The English country manor-style clubhouse, designed by Tulsa architects John Duncan Forsyth and Donald McCormick, opened on October 17, 1936, completing the club's magnificent complex. The major championship roll call at Southern Hills is extraordinary: the 1958 U.S. Open (won by Tommy Bolt), the 1970 PGA Championship (Dave Stockton), the 1977 U.S. Open (Hubert Green), the 1982 PGA Championship (Ray Floyd), the 1994 PGA Championship (Nick Price), the 2001 U.S. Open (Retief Goosen), the 2007 PGA Championship (Tiger Woods), and the 2022 PGA Championship (Justin Thomas). No other course has hosted the PGA Championship five times. The course underwent a significant renovation prior to the 2022 PGA Championship, restoring and enhancing Perry Maxwell's original design while updating the course's infrastructure for championship-level conditioning.

The renovation honored Maxwell's fundamental design vision — the natural terrain of the Tulsa hills, the strategic use of elevation changes, and the demanding green complexes that have tested the world's finest professionals for eight decades. Today Southern Hills Country Club continues to serve the Tulsa community as one of America's most historically significant and celebrated private golf institutions, maintaining Perry Maxwell's design legacy and the major championship tradition of a course that has witnessed more defining moments in professional golf than almost any other inland course in America.