Most nicknames attached to famous golf courses arrive as compliments or insults, some verdict on how the course plays. Wentworth’s West Course got its nickname from neither. Burma Road has nothing to do with the golf at all, and everything to do with what happened to the land during the Second World War, decades before the course became the stage it is today.
A wartime clearing job that stuck
The British Army requisitioned Wentworth’s clubhouse during the war, dug bunkers into the grounds, and deliberately let the fairways grow wild and overgrown, a piece of camouflage meant to stop enemy aircraft from mistaking the open turf for a landing strip. By the time the war ended, restoring the course meant clearing years of unchecked growth off land that had been left to run feral on purpose. German prisoners of war from a nearby camp at Egham were brought in to do the clearing, and one British officer overseeing the work is said to have compared the scale of the job to the Burma Road, the seven-hundred-mile supply route that around two hundred thousand labourers had carved through the hills between Kunming and Lashio a few years earlier to keep China’s war effort alive. The comparison was meant as a joke about the sheer size of the task. It outlived the joke and became the course’s name.
Harry Colt’s design, and the estate that surrounds it
The West Course opened in 1926, the work of Harry Colt, one of the architects most responsible for what British golf looks like in the first place, and it sits on land developed a few years earlier by the builder W.G. Tarrant, who bought the old Wentworth estate in 1922 and set about turning it into one of the country’s first purpose-built golf-and-housing developments. Tarrant went bankrupt within a decade, undone by the Depression rather than by the course itself, and ownership passed to new hands that kept the golf largely as Colt had drawn it. What he left behind is a heathland course in the classic Surrey mould, pine and birch lining sandy, well-drained ground that plays firm and fast in a way parkland courses further from London rarely manage, with a closing stretch that has decided more European tournaments than almost any finishing holes outside the majors.
From Palmer’s Match Play to Rolex Series flagship
Wentworth’s tournament history runs deeper than any one event. The West Course hosted the Ryder Cup in 1953 and the World Cup in 1956, but its reputation as a genuine stage was built by the World Match Play Championship, staged there from 1964 through 2007, a format that turned the course’s tightening finishing holes into theatre year after year as fields of the best players in the world knocked each other out one match at a time. When the tournament calendar shifted toward stroke play, Wentworth did not lose its place. The PGA Championship, now the BMW PGA Championship, has been played there every year since 1984 and sits today as the DP World Tour’s flagship Rolex Series event, the closest thing European golf has to a home major. J.J. Spaun’s win there this past week, closing with four birdies in his last five holes to hold off Manuel Elvira’s late collapse, was only the latest chapter of a tournament history that already includes the likes of Seve Ballesteros, Colin Montgomerie, and Rory McIlroy among its champions.
The Els years, and a course still finding its balance
No discussion of the modern West Course is complete without Ernie Els, who took on the role of the club’s touring professional in the early 2000s and spent more than a decade quietly reshaping the course he had grown to know as well as anyone in the field. Between 2005 and 2017, Els lengthened the layout by roughly 310 yards and added around thirty new bunkers, changes aimed at keeping a course laid out for hickory shafts and small-headed drivers relevant against players who now carry the ball further than Colt could have imagined. Not every change was loved by the players who had to live with it, and some of the more severe additions from the middle of that stretch were later softened as the club and its touring pros worked out where modernising a heathland classic tips into simply making it awkward. What survives is still recognisably Colt’s routing, still recognisably a Burma Road that rewards position over brute force, only now defending itself against a game the wartime officer who named it could never have pictured.