Why doesn’t Oak Hill produce bigger champions?
Northwestern New York’s Oak Hill Country Club, the site of the PGA Championship starting Thursday, has hosted a dozen major or national championships, including United States Opens, previous PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup.
It is a classic course designed by Donald Ross, a respected Golden Age architect, and recently restored by Andrew Green, a top architect whose work has given new life to other championship venues, including Congressional Country Clublast year’s site KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.
On paper, Oak Hill looks great. But it’s been haunted by a somewhat academic question in golf: Why hasn’t it produced better champions in recent years? The players who have won on the course are not a who’s who of the hall-of-fame players.
Shaun Michael won the PGA Championship there in 2003, for his only PGA Tour win. Jason Dufner, who set the course record there in 2013 by winning the PGA, has won five PGA Tour events but has a reputation for being extremely relaxed when playing. The condition “Dufnering” was coined to describe his behavior both in tournaments and off-season.
The course, in Pittsford, NY, near Rochester, has also hosted two Senior PGA Championships, won in 2008 by journeyman pro Jay Haas and in 2019 by Ken Tanigawaa former amateur who qualified for the Champions Tour the previous year after turning 50.
So what gives?
It’s complicated.
The United States hosts three of the major golf championships, two of which rotate from course to course each year. (The Masters tournament is always held at Augusta National Golf Club.) By comparison, only the British Open, the fourth major, revolves around Great Britain.
But the United States Golf Association has laid claim to a series of classic, tough golf tests to host the US Open. In doing so, it has created a de facto rotation of courses, including Winged Foot Golf Club in New York, Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania, Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina and Pebble Beach Golf Links in California, along with a mix of other pre-war courses, including the Country Club in Massachusetts and Merion Golf Club in Pennsylvania. The governing body has embraced a schedule that locks some venues decades in advance, under the guise that where you win your US Open championship is just as important to players as the win itself.
“The USGA has said you have to be 100 or older to host a US Open, and they go to the best golf courses in the world, and it’s a short roster,” said Ran Morrissett, a founder of Golf Club Atlas , which analyzes course architecture. “Who will argue that the governing body is making a mistake in going to the best golf courses in the world?”
But the USGA, which lays claim to great jobs decades in advance — Merion, for instance, is already poised to host the 2030 and 2050 U.S. Opens — has created a division of sorts: a club is either a venue where the USGA hosts the U.S. Open hosts , or it is a PGA of America site, which hosts events such as the Men’s and Women’s PGA Championships, and sometimes the Ryder Cup competition.
Has the PGA had weaker venues? Some golf historians say yes, while others argue that the picture is more complicated, given that older courses are being renovated and challenging new courses are constantly being built.
“It’s almost impossible for the PGA Championship to compete,” said Connor T. Lewis, general manager of the Society of Golf Historians. “Oakmont is now a USGA anchorage. They’ve had the US Open nine times.”
Although Oakmont had hosted the PGA Championship three times, he added, now that the course has become a USGA anchor, hosting the PGA Championship is “off the table.”
Still, he’s optimistic that the changes made to the PGA Championship venue this year will present golfers with different challenges than last time, when the PGA was played at a very different Oak Hill. “This year we’re going to see Oak Hill at its best,” he said. “It’s going to be very much a Donald Ross course.”
Like many major championship venues, Oak Hill added non-original features in the 1960s and 1970s in the belief that more trees equaled a harder course. It worked for a while, but as those trees grew, they narrowed the fairways and limited the opportunities for making shots.
Other courses followed suit, including Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey, which will host the 2029 PGA Championship. After Phil Mickelson, who has now won a total of six majors, won the PGA there in 2005, Jimmy Walker won the 2016 PGA there, his only major. The track has since been restored by Gil Hanse to open it up and bring back the original AW Tillinghast design.
Like other classic courses that have recently hosted major championships, Oak Hill underwent extensive restoration that reversed many modern changes. Green’s restoration of the track, who removed trees and opened up the track, could increase the number of possible champions this year.
Morrissett, the founder of Golf Club Atlas, said the changes could make a difference in the quality of the champion this time around. “Since Oak Hill is now more of a classic Donald Ross course, it could produce a Ben Hogan-esque winner,” he said, referring to one of the greatest players of the 1950s. “I like that a thoughtful player can win.”
Kerry Haigh, the chief championships officer at the PGA of America – whose job it is to set up the courses for a major like this – admits that recent PGA champions at Oak Hill took advantage of the track conditions back then.
Before the restoration, there was “certainly a premium on driving accuracy as the fairways are quite narrow and the rough usually quite tough,” he said. “Because the trees played an important part of the challenge, the previous two winners weren’t particularly long hitters, but were able to control their game and keep their ball in play.”
Haigh said the course design is most important. The PGA has made its mark on hard-but-fair setups that allow for some exciting loads on Sunday. (This is in contrast to the USGA. It sets up each course as a stern—some players argue, unforgiving—test of golf. When Bryson DeChambeau won the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot, one of its anchorages, he was the only player to break par for four days.)
Some historians argue that even visiting these classic courses is a mistake for the PGA. Morrissett said that with the USGA’s lock on older courses, the PGA should look at great courses built after 1960 to showcase the variety of golf in America. He points to the 2021 PGA Championship at the Ocean Course on South Carolina’s Kiawah Island, a Pete and Alice Dye design that opened in 1991, as one of the more exciting and watchable Sunday finishes in recent major history, when Mickelson Brooks Koepka held off Louis Oosthuizen at the 2021 PGA Championship to become the oldest major champion.
“I loved the finish,” said Morrissett. “A par 5 could you eagle or double bogey? That is exciting.”
He ticked modern courses such as Erin Hills in Wisconsin, Chambers Bay in Washington State and the recently opened PGA Frisco course in Texas, which will become a hub for the PGA. that are designed for today’s equipment,” he said.
Haigh, the championship’s chief officer, said including those newer courses was part of the PGA’s plan. “That’s been our philosophy to mix classic courses with more modern courses,” he said, ticking Bellerive in Missouri and Valhalla in Kentucky in addition to Kiawah. “It’s been our philosophy for the 30 years I’ve been here, and I expect it to stay that way.”
Still, his focus is on this week and he is optimistic that Oak Hill will produce a deserving champion. “It looks like there may be more options for players missing the fairways, but they are still as wide as previous years,” he said. “We will see.”