Why there’s a lot to like about the options in the City of Brotherly Love.

The Golf Course at Glen Mills, 40 minutes from downtown Philadelphia, has not only been named by Golf Digest as “one of America’s 100 greatest public golf courses,” it’s also the greatest golf story I know. You get the short version in the unusual message printed on each scorecard: our golf course is directly linked to the glen mills school . . . the oldest existing residential facility in the country for troubled youths. The course was opened eight years ago in large part to train reform-school students to work in the turf-management and club-operations trades.

As of today, 36 graduates have been placed in golf-course jobs across the country.

So how good is the course? Well, let’s just say Golf Digest got it right: 235 acres, rolling to hilly, with wetlands, dense woodlands, massive rock formations and 18 tremendous greens. On the 195- yard tenth, for example, the green is a 17,000-square-foot rectangle lying 100 feet below the tee on the valley floor.

Switching to the private sector, there are a number of obvious choices, but my favorite is the Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Wissahickon course in Flourtown.

Locally born Albert Warren “Tillie” Tillinghast learned the game on the club’s first course and competed in both U.S. Opens held there, in 1907 and 1910. Then, in 1921, as a member of the club, he designed a course that put the original one in the shade. And here it is, 87 years later, marvelous as ever, with not one weak or indifferent hole.

Does any layout in the world close each nine with a more spectacular par-four than the ninth (sloping uphill, past water, trees and sand to a two-tiered green) and eighteenth (sloping sharply downhill to a spectacular knoll, with a stream, sand and trees) at Flourtown?

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