When you want to play in a public course in Metro-Manila and your considerations are quality and convenience, the course that will invariably come to mind will be the Villamor Golf Club.
Long considered the Big Brother of military courses in the metropolis, Villamor is the Air Force golf course. It was built in the 1960s to provide members of the Philippine military with a rest and recreation facility. Squeezed in now by unmitigated real estate development and road widening along its boundaries, the course has remarkably held its own.
The general routing is still there, and the hole-by-hole challenges continue to present themselves, so the spirit of the old Nichols Golf Club still haunts the fairways and greens of this course. What also hasn’t changed is the impeccable maintenance of the course which has been the standard by which the other military courses have always been judged.
Villamor was the host of the Philippine Masters which was, for some time, traditionally held the week before the Philippine Open. Efforts to revive the tournament have been sporadic at best, but this only shows the status that Villamor holds in Philippine golf.
