The Story
The land was a cattle ranch first. The Park family bought the property on Lake Tahoe's south shore in 1896, and for most of a century their cows grazed the meadow where the casinos of Stateline now cast their evening shadows. In the 1960s the family decided the lakefront deserved a golf course, and they hired George Fazio — the Philadelphia pro turned architect — to build it. Edgewood opened in 1968: a big, level, pine-framed parkland at 6,200 feet, with the Sierra crest on one side and Lake Tahoe lapping at the other.
The championships came quickly for a resort course in the mountains. The U.S. Amateur Public Links arrived in 1980, won by a young Jodie Mudd on his way to a PGA Tour career. Five years later Edgewood hosted the 1985 U.S. Senior Open, and the course showed its teeth — Miller Barber was the only man in the field to break par. George's nephew Tom Fazio, by then one of the most celebrated architects in the game, later returned to renovate his uncle's design.
But what made Edgewood famous in living rooms across the country began in 1990, when the celebrity tournament now known as the American Century Championship made the course its permanent summer home. Every July, quarterbacks, point guards, and comedians play NBC's most-watched offseason golf — and the par-3 17th, hard against the beach, turns into the loudest hole in the sport, ringed by fans and a flotilla of boats. In 2023, Stephen Curry rolled in a walk-off eagle on the 18th green and the lake itself seemed to roar.
Through it all, Edgewood remains what it started as: a family-run course open to anyone with a tee time. You play the first sixteen holes waiting, and then the course walks you out to the water for the finish — the lake so close and so blue it hardly looks real, which is exactly the memory you take home.