“Doak’s a professional,” he was told by another in his group. “I can’t have him build these kind of greens for the retail golfer,” Keiser said. When Keiser played the course on opening day, he was considering hiring Doak to design Pacific Dunes. “The wildest set of greens I’ve ever built,” said Doak soon after it opened. Since the greens were shaped from native sand, the green contours are very bold. (Nothing wrong with that: Oakmont is bisected by the Pennsylvania Turnpike.) There was still plenty of sand left in the quarry, which allowed Doak and his team to create some vast sandy waste areas as well as windblown dunes-style bunkers. Lost Dunes Golf Club, a half hour north along the same sand ridge, was created from an old sand quarry, lined on three sides by 60-foot-tall forested sand dunes, bottomed by two deep pit lakes and traversed through the center by I-94. Opens to Oakland Hills-as well as a number of upcoming USGA championships.Īnyone who has ever played Mike Keiser’s terrific nine-hole Dunes Club in New Buffalo, Mich.-one of the best nine-hole courses in America, if not the best-is familiar with the “lost dunes” that exist along that stretch of Lake Michigan in southeast Michigan. The course re-opened in Spring 2021, and though a crippling fire destroyed the club's iconic clubhouse, the USGA delivered some kind news to the club, bringing the 20 U.S. They did that by expanding greens to recapture what are some of Ross's best contours, removed trees to show off the rolling landscape and shifted bunkers back to where Ross, not RTJ, placed them. In 2019, the South course closed as Gil Hanse and his team significantly renovated the course with the intention of removing the Jones influences and restoring its Ross feel. Sixty-plus years later, Oakland Hills is even longer, but its bite wasn’t severe when it hosted the 2016 U.S. His rebunkering was overshadowed by ankle-deep rough, and after Ben Hogan closed with a 67, one of only two rounds under par 70 all week, to win his second consecutive Open, he complained that Jones had created a Frankenstein. Sadly, he died in 1948, so Robert Trent Jones got the job. Donald Ross felt his 1918 design was out-of-date for the 1951 U.S.
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