Golf in Nebraska

Contents

1. Johnny Goodman and the amateur tradition
2. Omaha Country Club and the Senior Open
3. The Sandhills discovery
4. The second wave of courses
5. A public course built by a farmer
6. The state association and its championships
7. Keeping the grass alive
8. A short glossary

Brent O’Mara hunts, fishes and plays golf outside work, and he is a devoted Nebraska Cornhuskers fan, and the named figure that golf in his state keeps returning to is Johnny Goodman, an Omaha native. Goodman won the national open championship as an amateur in 1933, and no amateur has won it since, the United States Golf Association notes in its account of the clubs that have hosted its championships; three years earlier he had won the second of three straight Nebraska State Amateurs at Omaha Country Club.⁴ His name is the right place to start because it holds together the two halves of the story this entry tells: an amateur tradition organized by clubs and a state association, and a landscape in the western part of the state that the golf world discovered late and now travels to see.

Johnny Goodman and the amateur tradition

The amateur game in Nebraska runs through its clubs. The USGA’s history lists Omaha Country Club as the host of the state amateur on sixteen occasions, most recently in 2016, and records that the club was laid out in 1925 on 190 acres of farmland and woods, redesigned in 1951 by Perry Maxwell, a founding member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, and renovated again in 2005.⁴ Goodman’s three consecutive state titles, with the 1930 edition at that club, came in the years just before his open championship, and they show the ladder a Nebraska amateur climbed then and climbs now: a club championship, the state amateur, then a national field.

Omaha Country Club and the Senior Open

The same club brought the national game to the state. In June 2017 the USGA announced that the U.S. Senior Open would return to Omaha Country Club in July 2021, its second Senior Open and second USGA championship there, after the 2013 championship at which Kenny Perry shot a closing 63, one off the championship record, to win by five strokes with a 72 hole total that matched the lowest in the event’s history.⁴ The 2021 championship was to be the fourth USGA championship played in Nebraska, following the 1941 U.S. Amateur at the Field Club of Omaha and the 1996 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Firethorn Golf Club in Lincoln. The USGA described the Senior Open, first played in 1980, as open to any professional and any amateur aged 50 or older with a handicap index not above 3.4.⁴

Figure

National championships played in Nebraska

1. 01
   1941The U.S. Amateur at the Field Club of Omaha, won by Marvin Ward.
2. 02
   1996The U.S. Women's Amateur at Firethorn Golf Club in Lincoln, won by Kelli Kuehne.
3. 03
   2013The U.S. Senior Open at Omaha Country Club, won by Kenny Perry with a closing 63.
4. 04
   2021The U.S. Senior Open returns to Omaha Country Club, July 8 to 11.

The Sandhills discovery

The other half of the story is dunes. A 2005 New York Times travel essay opened on the first tee at Wild Horse Golf Club in Gothenburg, a fairway of ripples and hollows bordered by golden fescue, with no houses in sight, and explained that the Great Plains had become the sport’s surprise hotbed in a decade because of a private club that opened in 1995 ninety minutes to the northwest: Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, population 456.¹ Its architects, Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, moved only 3,000 cubic yards of earth, where a celebrated Las Vegas course of 1990 had required more than 2.8 million, and the club chose a modest clubhouse over the usual multimillion dollar building. The minimalist example produced a run of public courses across the region, Wild Horse in 1998 among them.¹

The second wave of courses

A second generation followed. The Omaha World Herald visited GrayBull, north of Maxwell, in October 2023 as it neared completion as the newest course in a Nebraska based network of private clubs, and placed it in the wave that began with CapRock Ranch near Valentine, Landmand north of Homer and Lost Rail outside Omaha.³ Its architect, David McLay Kidd, told the paper he had never built a course in America where so little building was needed: the routing was the whole problem, the dunes in the middle of the property being a hundred feet high and impossible to play through, so the holes were spilled across the land around them, with a six hole loop running out to the northeastern corner and back.³

A public course built by a farmer

Not all of the new courses are private. The Wall Street Journal described Landmand Golf Club as one of the most improbable stories in golf, a public course in the middle of nowhere where a farmer looked at his land, saw a course, built it, and found that people came in large numbers for a product they could find nowhere else; the paper called its tee times the hardest in America to get.² The World Herald’s survey of the second wave confirmed that Landmand offers public tee times where most of its neighbors do not.³

Figure

Two ways to build a course in the 1990s

	Sand Hills Golf Club, Nebraska	Shadow Creek, Las Vegas
Opened	1995, in Mullen, population 456	1990
Earth moved	3,000 cubic yards	more than 2.8 million cubic yards
Clubhouse	a modest structure	the customary multimillion dollar building

The state association and its championships

Between the private dune courses and the municipal nine holers sits the Nebraska Golf Association, which describes itself as founded in 1966 and made up of the members of public and private clubs and regional associations that use its handicap service. As an allied association of the USGA it administers handicaps, rates courses, interprets the rules of golf and of amateur status, runs tournaments and qualifiers, and is governed by directors drawn from member clubs across the state.⁵ Its calendar can be read through one event. The 2026 Nebraska Senior Amateur, the twenty eighth, was played over two days in July at Tatanka Golf Club in Niobrara, open to amateurs who had turned 50 and held a handicap at a member club, with a field of 120 filled first by past champions and then by order of entry, and age divisions from the fifties to 72 and older.⁶ The association’s records for the event go back to 1999 and list its hosts, from Beatrice to Fremont to the Sandhills.

Figure

The state senior amateur, 2026

minimum age on the first day of play

50

players in the field

120

holes over two days

36

age divisions, from the fifties to 72 and older

4

Keeping the grass alive

Every course depends on turf, and in Nebraska the science of it sits at the university. The turfgrass program in Lincoln brings together specialists in breeding, weed science, plant physiology, entomology and soil and water management, with a stated mission of maintaining high quality turf while reducing water and other inputs, and it publishes advice through the year for turf managers across the Great Plains, including an annual field day.⁷ The football program on the same campus replaced its own grass with a synthetic surface in the late 1990s, as the Memorial Stadium entry recounts, and the outdoor life that shares a season with golf is covered in the entry on hunting and fishing.

A short glossary

A links course, in the sense the Sandhills courses borrow, is one laid over sand and native grass with little earth moved. A minimalist design is one that shapes greens and tees and leaves the rest to the land. A public course sells tee times to anyone; a private club plays by membership. A handicap index is the number the state association maintains so that players of different ability can compete, and the measured difficulty of a course is the figure on which that index depends. An amateur, under the rules the association applies, is a player who does not play for prize money, which is why Goodman’s 1933 title still stands alone. The Senior Open is the national championship for players 50 and older, and the state senior amateur is its Nebraska counterpart.