Winged Foot Golf Club: East Course

The East Course at Winged Foot is A.W. Tillinghast's quieter companion to the more celebrated West in Mamaroneck, New York, opened the same day in 1923. Shorter than its sibling but no less architecturally complex, the East features bold Tillinghast bunkering and some of the most dramatic green complexes in American golf, restored to their original scale by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner in 2020.

Winged Foot Golf Club was founded in 1921 by a group of New York Athletic Club members, and its two A.W. Tillinghast courses opened on the same day — September 8, 1923 — in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York. While the West Course has drawn the lion's share of major-championship attention over the past century, the East Course is regarded by many members and architects as Tillinghast's equal work on the property, and by some as the superior design. The East plays to a par of 72 and measures roughly 6,808 yards from the back tees, with a course rating of 73.6 and a slope of 140. The routing traverses the same rolling Westchester terrain as the West but features more dramatic green contours and several distinctive short par fours that highlight Tillinghast's preference for strategic rather than purely penal design.

The course's opening hole and its quartet of one-shotters are particularly celebrated among Tillinghast scholars. The East Course has hosted two U.S. Women's Opens — in 1957 won by Betsy Rawls, and in 1972 won by Susie Maxwell Berning — as well as the 1980 U.S. Senior Open won by Roberto De Vicenzo. It also served as a qualifying venue for the 2004 U.S. Amateur. Though its major-championship footprint is smaller than the West's, the East has long held a place in competitive amateur and senior golf. Over the decades, Tillinghast's original design at Winged Foot saw incremental reduction in green sizes and bunker definition, with the East's 18th green reportedly shrinking from nearly 10,000 square feet to around 4,000. In 2016-2018, architect Gil Hanse, working with partner Jim Wagner, restored the West Course's bunkers and greens to Tillinghast's original dimensions using laser scanning technology to recover lost putting surfaces. Hanse and Wagner applied the same approach to the East in 2020, re-establishing bunker edges, expanding greens back to their 1923 footprints, and reclaiming corner-pocket hole locations that had fallen out of use.

The East remains an 18-hole private layout played alongside the West as part of Winged Foot's two-course membership. The club has been selected to host the 2028 U.S. Open on the West, with both courses continuing to serve as showcases for Tillinghast's golden-age architecture.