Medinah Country Club’s Course No. 3 has hosted more major championships than most clubs manage in a century, and yet the version waiting for the Presidents Cup this month barely resembles the one that produced any of them. That is not an accident of neglect. It is the point. Medinah has spent the better part of a decade deciding it did not want to be remembered only as the tight, tree-lined test that broke so many hearts in 2012, and the result is a golf course that turned up to its own centenary looking almost unrecognisable.
A women’s course that got angry fast
Course No. 3 opened in 1928, designed by Tom Bendelow and originally built with the club’s female members in mind, which is a detail almost nobody associates with Medinah today given everything that happened next. Two years later, Harry Cooper shot a 63 at the 1930 Medinah Open, and the club’s reaction was less admiration than alarm. Harry Collis spent the rest of the decade toughening the layout, and what emerged was a course narrow enough and demanding enough to host five majors over the following seventy years, including both of Tiger Woods’s PGA Championship victories in 1999 and 2006. By the time the Ryder Cup arrived in 2012, Medinah had a reputation as one of the most unforgiving championship venues in American golf, walled in on nearly every hole by mature oak trees that turned an errant drive into a full recovery shot rather than a minor inconvenience.
The Miracle, and what it left behind
No round at Medinah gets discussed more than the Sunday singles of the 2012 Ryder Cup, when Europe overturned a four-point deficit to retain the cup in what quickly became known as the Miracle at Medinah. It remains the defining Ryder Cup collapse and comeback of the modern era, and it happened on a course whose tightness was supposed to favour the home team’s long hitters rather than produce the kind of dramatic, momentum-driven golf that decided the weekend. The par-3 17th, nicknamed the Cathedral in the Wilderness for the way its green sits below a natural amphitheatre of trees, carried much of that Sunday’s tension, and it remains the hole most golf fans picture when Medinah comes up in conversation.
Why the club tore up its own identity
By the 2010s, Medinah’s membership and leadership had reached an uncomfortable conclusion: the course that made the club famous was also increasingly out of step with how the game is played and watched. Corridors that narrow leave little room for spectators at a modern professional event, and a design built entirely around punishing the tee shot had become a one-dimensional test in an era when firm turf, wide fairways, and strategic angles are what separate a genuinely great modern championship course from a merely difficult one. The club hired OCM Golf, the design firm led by 2006 US Open champion Geoff Ogilvy, to lead a complete transformation that reopened in the summer of 2024. Out went much of the wall-to-wall tree cover. In came larger, more contoured greens, bigger and more strategically placed bunkering, wider fairways, and broad expanses of long fescue rough standing in for some of what the trees used to do. The stated aim was a course that plays differently depending on wind, firmness, and pin position rather than one that plays the same punishing way every day regardless of conditions.
A fitting stage for an International captain
There is a neat symmetry to Ogilvy’s firm reshaping the course his International team will contest as captain this September, the first Presidents Cup Medinah has ever hosted. It gives him a working knowledge of the redesign that no rival captain can match, though whether that translates into any real edge over four days of team golf is the kind of thing golf people love to debate and can never quite prove. What is not in question is that Medinah arrives at this Presidents Cup as a genuinely different golf course than the one that hosted the 2012 Ryder Cup, broader, more open to the sky, and built to reward a wider range of shots than the narrow corridors that made its reputation. Whether that makes for better golf than the white-knuckle version everyone remembers is exactly what this month’s matches are about to find out.