A new 9-hole course on a century-old footprint, with features revived from the Golden Age?
Mention Met Links to an avid golfer in Rhode Island, and you’re apt to trigger memories of what used to be.
Founded in the early 1900s as Metacomet Golf Club and relocated to its current East Providence, R.I., address in 1919, the course began its life with muddy DNA. Depending on the telling, it was either designed by the club’s head professional, Leonard Byles, or two-time Open Championship winner Willie Park Jr. Or perhaps a combination of the two.
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What no one disputes is that a few years later, Donald Ross carried out a redesign, tweaking the routing and — most significantly — constructing new greens and bunkers, which became a hallmark of the course.
An intimate 6,500-yard layout, Metacomet protected itself with narrow playing corridors, but its rumpled putting surfaces — and the hazards and buzzed-down edges that surrounded them — were its principal defense. If you could make par there, you could make it anywhere.
Metacomet (the name was later changed to Metacomet Country Club) operated as a private club, and in a region of the country rich with Ross designs, it ranked among the finest, not as nationally renowned as, say, Wannamoisett, but locally beloved and rightly regarded as a premium test.
No wonder its downturn was a big deal.
Mention that part of the narrative to a Rhode Island golfer, and you might trigger memories of the “Faxon 5.” That became local shorthand for an ownership group that included homegrown hero Brad Faxon, an eight-time Tour winner who honed his famous short game on Metacomet’s greens.
In 2019, with Metacomet in financial distress, Faxon and four others acquired the club. The story appeared primed for a happy ending, with a local golf celebrity in a savior role. Instead, it morphed into a tangled legal drama, with Metacomet’s membership suing Faxon’s group for fraud. That suit was settled in 2024.
Along the way, in 2020, Metacomet shut down and then was sold again, this time to a Providence-based development firm, which approached the property with a hybrid plan: the back nine of the course would be set aside for real estate, and the front nine would be revived under the direction of local architect Robert McNeil and his team at Northeast Golf Company.
In their restoration work, McNeil and Co. brought back seven original holes on their original footprint, replete with their Ross-ian features and strategic demands, and built two new holes to mesh with the character of the rest. The result, which opened for play last summer, is a public-access 9-hole layout brimming with Golden Age appeal and bolstered by contemporary branding: Met Links is its name.
To some golfers in the area, there will never be another course like Metacomet. There can be no stand in. And that’s the point. Met Links is a partial resurrection, not a replacement, a compelling newborn course with a complicated past. Play it with that mindset, and you’re bound to feel grateful for what’s been salvaged rather than hung up on what’s been lost.
