Colonial Country Club

Colonial Country Club opened in 1936 on a piece of Fort Worth, Texas Trinity River bottom land that founder Marvin Leonard — a Fort Worth retailer — assembled for the project. John Bredemus designed the original routing, and Perry Maxwell consulted on the green complexes. The course's identity is permanently tied to Ben Hogan: he was a Colonial member, played out of the club throughout his career, and won the Colonial National Invitational five times (1946, 1947, 1952, 1953, 1959) — more than any other PGA Tour event. The tournament has been played at Colonial every May since 1946, and the course is known as "Hogan's Alley" in the same way Riviera carries the nickname for his 1948 U.S. Open win.

The course plays around 7,200 yards par 70 from the championship markers, with bermuda fairways and a slope in the upper 140s. The fifth — a 481-yard par-4 with a dogleg right and a green set on a rise above the Trinity River bottom — is the routing's most-quoted hole and is widely considered one of the toughest par-4s on the PGA Tour. The eighteenth, a 433-yard par-4 with a green set above a creek crossing, has been the deciding hole in multiple Charles Schwab Challenge editions. Colonial hosted the 1941 U.S. Open (Craig Wood) and the 1956 U.S. Open (Cary Middlecoff) before becoming a Tour-event-only venue.

Colonial is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership includes Fort Worth corporate and oil-industry families with multi-generation ties to the club. The hospitality model is traditional and the club has invested in continuous restoration to keep the original Bredemus-Maxwell vocabulary intact.

North Texas climate gives Colonial a playing season of March through November. Fort Worth summers run hot and humid; the smart member play is morning rounds through July and August. The course closes through brief winter cold snaps but reopens within days. The Trinity River runs through the back nine and the autumn cottonwood color along the river corridor gives the routing seasonal photographic appeal through October.