There is a small category of golf courses in the world that have been built, in defiance of the land available to the architect, to look as if they were always there. Pebble Beach and Cypress Point have the advantage of land that was always going to be a golf course. Sand Hills found a dune field in Nebraska that nobody had thought to look at. Whistling Straits, on the western shoreline of Lake Michigan in the small Wisconsin town of Haven, did not find anything. It built it. The land Herb Kohler handed to Pete Dye in the mid-1990s was a flat former military airfield with a top dressing of sand and a long lakeshore frontage that, before Dye arrived, was producing nothing more interesting than the view. Dye spent four years turning it into a faux-links property that has, in the three decades since it opened, hosted three PGA Championships, a Senior US Open and the 2021 Ryder Cup. The course continues, in a way that few engineered properties manage, to look almost convincingly as if Dye did not build it.
The land and the imagination
The decision Dye took at the start of the project was the decision that defines the course. He could have built a parkland course of the kind the upper Midwest already had plenty of. He could have built a contemporary American resort layout with wide fairways and pin-friendly green complexes. He instead, on the strength of a series of trips to Ireland and Scotland that the design team has since spoken about, decided to build a links. The land had to be reshaped to make the decision work. Dye and his crews moved, depending on which number you believe, around eight hundred thousand cubic yards of soil and brought in another two hundred thousand from elsewhere on the Kohler estate. The shaping was done by hand and by a small fleet of excavators that, according to the construction logs, were used in ways the manufacturers had not anticipated. The result, by the time the course opened in 1998, was a property that looked from the air as if a glacier had spent a hundred thousand years preparing it for a golf course and then, at the last moment, let a member of the Royal and Ancient design it.
The result is, of course, not a links. The grasses are wrong. The soil drains in the way an engineered base drains, not in the way a properly sandy linksland drains. The course is in the wrong climate for true links conditions. A links course is a course shaped by the wind and the sea over centuries, and Whistling Straits was shaped by a man with a bulldozer and an unusually clear vision over four years. The point of the property is not that it is a links. The point is that it plays as if it were one in the few weeks of the year when the wind off the lake is doing the work the design has been hoping the wind would do.
The bunkers
The bunkering at Whistling Straits is the part of the course that has produced the most discussion since the day it opened. The number of bunkers on the property is, by every count, somewhere over a thousand. Pete Dye, who built the course, said in one interview that the number was around twelve hundred. Other estimates, from the agronomy staff who maintain the course, put the figure closer to nine hundred and sixty. The exact count does not really matter. The number is so far above the bunker count of any other championship course in the world that the comparison stops being useful. Augusta has forty-four bunkers. The Old Course has one hundred and twelve. Whistling Straits has approximately ten times the bunkering of the most famous American major venue.
The bunkers do not all play as hazards in the conventional sense. A significant number of them are, by the strictest reading of the rules, decorative. They sit on banks, on the sides of dunes, on slopes that the player will almost never have to play from. The rest, however, are very much in play, and the most famous moment in the modern history of the course involves a player who did not realise he was standing in one. Dustin Johnson, on the eighteenth hole of the final round of the 2010 PGA Championship, grounded his club in what he believed was a sandy spectator area. The committee, having reviewed the footage at length, ruled the area to be a bunker. The two-stroke penalty that followed removed him from the playoff. The episode has, in the fifteen years since, become the shorthand by which the rest of the bunkering on the property is now described. The course has approximately twelve hundred bunkers, and the visiting player will spend the first round trying to remember that any sandy depression they walk into is one of them.
The Ryder Cup
The 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits is, in retrospect, the week the course was, on Pete Dye’s intentions, completely vindicated. The American team led by Steve Stricker, with eight of the top ten players in the world, dismantled the visiting European team by the largest margin in the history of the modern Ryder Cup, nineteen points to nine. The week was a week of perfect Wisconsin weather, modest winds, firm fairways and greens that the European team, on a course they had not seen before, could not quite work out. The course, in those conditions, gave the American team a property on which their distance off the tee and their iron play could simply outperform a European team that had, on the visiting list, no obvious mechanism by which to outscore them. The week confirmed two things at once. The course was a serious championship venue. The course was also, in the conditions the home team had been given, a course that played slightly to the strengths of the American game.
The European players have, in the years since, said little about the course in public. The private remarks, where they have appeared, have settled on the same observation. The course is not, on the criteria the Ryder Cup committee uses, an unfair one. It is a fair course on which the home team had the larger natural advantage. The point is not a complaint. The point is a recognition that engineered courses, however carefully they imitate the courses on which the visiting team grew up, will always retain some of the engineering preferences of the people who built them. Whistling Straits was built for the American game. The 2021 Ryder Cup was, in retrospect, the week the engineering finally won.
What the course asks now
The course continues, in the time since the Ryder Cup, to host fewer professional events than the property would suggest it should. The PGA of America has signalled it will return for another PGA Championship. The Ryder Cup will, on current rotation, not return for some decades. The day-to-day visitor, who pays the resort guest rate and tees off on a quiet Wednesday morning in May, will play a course that retains every feature the championships were played on. The same bunkering. The same fescue. The same shoreline holes that the broadcast cameras have spent three Sundays in fifteen years pointing at. The course will, in the right wind, ask the visitor for shots they do not normally hit. It will, in the wrong wind, ask the visitor for shots they cannot hit at all. The four shoreline holes on the front nine are the four holes most visitors remember on the drive home. The course as a whole, when the property is sitting in the right kind of late-afternoon light, is one of the most photographed in the country for reasons the photograph cannot quite communicate.
The course pretends to be a links. It does not entirely succeed. The pretence is, however, the best version of the pretence the modern game has produced. Pete Dye, on the last property he built that anybody has called a masterpiece, set out to make an American golfer feel they were playing the kind of round their grandfather might have played on the Ayrshire coast. The American golfer who pays the resort rate and walks the eighteenth in a late afternoon wind off Lake Michigan understands, in a way the photograph cannot quite capture, why the pretence was worth the effort.