Hollywood Golf Club

Donald Ross designed Hollywood Golf Club in 1916 on a piece of Deal, New Jersey shore property a mile inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Ross was three years into the prolific stretch that produced more than four hundred American courses, working through his Massachusetts office while spending winters at Pinehurst, and Hollywood is one of the most-preserved Ross routings on the East Coast. The membership has resisted significant redesign through generations; the modern course plays substantially the same routing Ross laid out in 1916, with only minor agronomic updates and a 2008 restoration by Brian Silva that brought the bunkers and green complexes back closer to Ross's original lines.

The course plays around 6,886 yards par 72 from the back markers, with bent fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. Ross routed the eighteen holes through gentle coastal-plain terrain with natural drainage that the green complexes use for strategic defense. The fairways are tight, the rough is penal, and the bunkers — particularly the cross-bunkers at the landing zones — are placed in Ross's signature positions to defend the angle of approach rather than the playing-corridor entry. The fourteenth hole is a 421-yard par-4 with a green set behind a deep cross-bunker complex; the seventeenth, a 175-yard par-3 across a natural pond, is the routing's tournament-photographic signature.

Hollywood is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership is small and historically composed of New Jersey shore and New York metro business families. The club has hosted the U.S. Women's Open (1956) and several U.S. Mid-Amateur qualifying rounds but stays largely outside the modern major conversation.

New Jersey shore climate gives Hollywood a longer playing season than inland New Jersey courses — late March through November — with the firmest conditions in September and October. The Atlantic-influenced marine breeze keeps the property cooler in mid-summer than the inland shore communities. The course closes through brief winter cold snaps.