A golf course superintendent can tell you why Medinah tore up a course with three US Opens, two PGAs and a Ryder Cup: Justin Thomas shot 25 under there in 2019. The members voted to spend $23.5 million.
Medinah Country Club’s Course No. 3, a Tom Bendelow design from 1928, was toughened for fifty years for every championship it hosted: Dick Nugent in 1970, Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Roger Rulewich in the 1990s, Rees Jones in 2003 and 2010. Narrow corridors, thick rough, greens like marble staircases. By the 2019 BMW Championship the trees had grown into shade problems, the rough needed water the native fescue never did, and the field was flying the doglegs. Thomas shot 263 with a third-round 61. Golf Digest’s panel had ranked the course as high as tenth in America; by 2019 it had slid into the fifties, and the 2023-24 list put it 93rd.
In December 2021 more than 80 percent of the membership approved a master plan by the Australian firm OCM, Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead, whose only American job was Ben Hogan’s Shady Oaks. The course closed in October 2022, construction ran from April 2023, every hole was shaped and grassed by mid-October 2023, and it reopened in July 2024 after a full year dark. The bunker count went from about 70 to 100, set into natural rises and pulled tight to the greens. Fairways went from roughly 25 yards wide to 40, 50 and 60.