How Oak Hill was brought back to its roots

Oak Hill Country Club, near Rochester, NY, has been a well-known stop for professional men’s golf for decades: since 1956 it has hosted three US Opens, three PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup.

But when the PGA Championship returns to Oak Hill on Thursday for the first time since 2013, the East Course will be different than it has been for some of the elite tournaments it has hosted. In recent years, the club enlisted Andrew Green to interpret and restore some of Donald J. Ross’s original designs from the 1920s.

Green, who has also worked on overhauls at other major championship courses – Congressional Country Club, Inverness Club and Scioto Country Club – can sometimes be seen as “quite radical,” like Jack Nicklaus, who grew up playing at Scioto and won the 1980 PGA Championship at Oak Hill, it said recently.

However, in an interview this spring, Green said he saw the Oak Hill project as an opportunity to re-emphasize Ross’s approach, which includes unorthodox shapes for greens.

“I was most proud of being able to restore some of the golf holes lost to time,” said Green, who, to try to decipher the thinking of Ross, who died in 1948, used his writings, pencil sketches and and formalized drawings, as well as a selection of historical photographs.

Ross’s influence with Oak Hill had faded over the decades, especially with the work of the uncle-cousin duo George and Tom Fazio in the 1970s. Their changes, according to Oak Hill’s own account, “created a more challenging layout for the several major championships that followed”, but also drew “considerable criticism for not fitting” into Ross’ original design. Hundreds of new and eventually overgrown trees, the club said, had diverted the course of Ross’s vision.

“As the golf course evolved, players and critics and the golfing world had always felt there was a divide within the golf course itself,” said Green. “Really, the primary goal was to revive Ross and make the whole course feel like it had been there all along.”

No. 5: Small Poison

Par 3, 180 yards

The par-70 course measures 7,394 yards, 231 yards more than the 2013 PGA Championship but 151 yards less than how Augusta National Golf Club played at last month’s Masters Tournament. With the harsh environment expected to be challenging and parts of Oak Hill remarkably narrow, even after many trees have been removed, Green thinks the PGA Championship “could show an interesting balance to see if the guys who can really bomb it and hollow out, have a leg up on everyone else, or if someone who does really well on the golf course can still get in a good run.

An early glimpse of finesse will come at number 5, where a long tee shot will pretty much stifle hopes for a birdie and could even make it a formidable challenge to tap for par. Positioned between the fourth hole and what used to be number 15, the target emerges from a thicket of sand, rough and steep slopes. Green and his colleagues suggested number 5, where the green has two levels, as a midiron test.

“It’s going to be a bit of a twitchy shot, but aiming for the middle of the green and trying to make a putt would be my suggestion,” said Green. “The whole vision for it was to play off what Ross had on his original sixth hole.”

After a breakaway at number 5, the hole is now the most dangerous on the course, according to Green.

Allen’s Creek runs down the right from the start, forcing a player to choose between risking their tee shot going into the water – but also perhaps getting a better angle in the green if avoiding the danger – or facing a longer second shot to go .

“The green allows for a ball to be run into the approach, if that’s necessary with a longer club or if they get into trouble off the tee,” said Green, whose restored course has six holes in play. “The green itself, the front hole locations are quite accessible, but the back right location is very demanding, very difficult to get to. I suspect that on any given day during the championship they will probably put the hole back there and move the tees forward.”

Part of the challenge is that the creek doesn’t just run in a straight line off the tee, or even off it. Instead, it eventually moves diagonally across the approach and then up to the left side of the green.

No. 6, Green said, was of course the trickiest hole, given its placement and the patch of earth it sits on. With the fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth holes in a relatively narrow strip of earth, he assumed that Ross had “tried to find the most unique way of placing those golf holes more or less next to each other, and the result of that differentiation of hole to hole was what we got on the sixth.”

Green added: “He had four golf holes which, on a very flat piece of ground, would potentially be pretty much the same, but the way he used the ground and the creek made them different night and day, and there he was a genius in. It was a very clumsy piece of property that he had to work with – it wasn’t just a giant rectangle – and so the way he created the variety that he did is just mind blowing to me.

The longest hole, No. 13, could be a showcase for the equipment that allows top players to hit the ball further than ever. The hole moves uphill, taking players to the clubhouse, where Allen’s Creek appears at around 325 yards.

The evolution of equipment, Green predicted, will tempt top players to hit the ball across the creek, which has been relatively rare in Oak Hill’s history.

“We’ve added a new tee, but I still think the course will be laid out at times where players are tempted to play over that and come home in two,” said Green.

Water poses no threat beyond the creek, but near the newly designed green are two of Oak Hill’s 78 bunkers.

When Jason Dufner won the PGA Championship at Oak Hill in 2013, the 15th hole included an artificial pond stationed menacingly close to the pit surface and a rock wall.

“It was a very dramatic shot for major championship golf and TV,” Green said, “but it wasn’t very good for members’ play, and it didn’t represent anything Ross would have done.”

So the pond is gone. Missing left will send a ball into a bunker guarding the left side. If you miss to the right, the ball moves away from the target in short grass, forcing a player to make a delicate shot on the thinnest part of the green, which is narrow from left to right and deep from front to back – perhaps, said Green, a club one and a half difference, from front to back.

“It will be a very demanding shot to master both distance and spin to get close to the hole locations,” said Green.

If the tournament goes to a play-off, No. 15 will be part of it, along with the 14th and 18th holes.

At any major championship, the eyes are always on the 18th hole. For Green, it was the one that worried him the most.

“Unfortunately, that green stuck out a bit in its shape because it was very modern and didn’t fit with the others,” Green said.

Now the green, which sits on the edge of a steep hill that a player would have to carry with a second shot, has been extended and deepened on the right. The left side is shallower, front to back, and there are actually three different surfaces within the green to place the hole.

“Hitting a good drive is critical — absolutely critical,” Green said of the hole, where the fairway width can be as tight as 20 yards. “There are some very deep bunkers on the right side that will make it very difficult to get home.”

A player who successfully hits from the fairway to get his ball onto the area of ​​the green where the hole is may shoot a birdie. Otherwise, Green said, “it’s going to be quite a dramatic putt to make those three.”