Every Major Change at Medinah No. 3

The No. 3 course at Medina Country Club outside of Chicago is one of the most storied tournament sites in American golf. The course has hosted three U.S. Opens, a Senior Open, two PGA Championships, both won by Tiger Woods, and was the stage for one of the largest come-from-behind victories in the history of the Ryder Cup. But when you see Medina today, you're not going to recognize it. The course underwent a major transformative remodel in 2023 and 2024, and almost nothing is like it was before. Hello, I'm Derek Duncan, the Architecture Editor at Golf Digest, and I'm going to walk you through the most important changes at Medina Country Club's historic No. 3 course and show you what you can expect when the United States and international teams compete there during the President's Cup. We're going to focus on several holds individually, particularly new creations like the 13th, 16th, and 17th that are the most dramatic changes. But first, let's set the stage and talk about the big picture. What the heck has happened at Medina, and what's led the course to being so dramatically transformed? The first and most noticeable thing about Medina compared to the way it was before is that there are far, far fewer trees now. During the recent remodel of the No. 3 course by the Australian design firm OCM, that's U.S. Open champion Jeff Ogilvie, along with partners hundreds of trees were taken out. The site isn't clear-cut like at Oakmont or Shinnecock Hills, but it's a staggering contrast compared to just a few years ago. Trees were always a major component of Medina. Many of the oaks and hickories were indigenous to the property before golf, and thousands of elms, maples, ash, and birch were planted after it opened. In fact, Medina was one of the first courses in the U.S. to have a comprehensive tree planting plan developed all the way back in 1934. For most of its existence, No. 3 was the prototypical hard U.S. Open-style tournament course. That meant narrow fairways, and yes, lots and lots of trees. In fact, an official count prior to the 1999 PGA Championship placed the number of trees lining the fairways and greens at 4,161. If you recall watching that event and any of the other major tournaments held here, that's probably the image that comes to mind. Tight, tree-lined fairways, as well as small greens circled and rough, lots of dog legs, and a number of holes playing across Lake Khadija, the body of water that separates the beginning and end holes from the rest of the golf course. That was the formula that cemented Medina No. 3's place in every edition of our America's 100 Greatest Courses rankings since the 1960s when the list began. And for decades, it lived inside the top 30, frequently inside the top 15 or 20. Medina was a standard bearer of what difficult tournament courses should be. But about 15 years ago, as architectural tastes began to shift toward playability, strategic complexity, and openness, Medina's ranking began to fall. Those densely packed holes that forced players to hit prescribed straight shots began to be viewed as a liability. The course dropped from being ranked in the 30s all the way down in 2023 to No. 93. The Coup de Grace was the 2019 BMW Championship where the top three scores were all more than 20 under par, led by Justin Thomas at minus 25. Medina was out of step architecturally, and now it wasn't even administering the beatings to the pros it was once known for. The club knew that something drastic had to be done, and that made them sympathetic to OCM's proposal to fundamentally reimagine what the No. 3 course might be. The first step, but hardly the only step, was to open up the playing corridors by removing trees and essentially re-establishing the meadow holes on the south side of the property that started out treeless 100 years ago when the course was being built. This allowed the greens and fairways to be expanded, allowed for the addition of extended short grass runoffs, and for OCM's bunkering to be placed in more strategic rather than penal locations. Players at Medina now have drive, approach shot, and short game options they haven't seen in nearly a century. That means playing well depends as much on thinking as on pure execution. The tree removal has an evident aesthetic, agronomic, and strategic impact, but OCM also structurally changed the layout. Every hole at Medina was altered. Fairways were shifted, greens were shaped and re-contoured to provide more interesting putts in more diverse hole locations, and bunkers were introduced by the dozens. Two of my favorite changes are to holes 6 and 7. 6 was a fairly basic straight par 4, but OCM moved the fairway to the left and set it hard against a straight out-of-bounds split rail fence. The green is also pushed up directly against the fence so it's possible to chip the ball out of play. The danger of coming into contact with the boundary line is constant. It's a big hole, but it's also funky and nervous like something you'd expect to find in Scotland, not Chicago. 7 was formerly played as the 10th, and it was a solid par 5, but now the fairway has more movement. It swings out to the right, then detours back left around a centerline bunker before darting back right along another out-of-bounds line into the green. It requires more tactical plotting and makes much better use of the space at the open southern end of the property, an option only available once the trees there were removed. OCM also built six entirely new holes, holes that didn't exist before, and they make for a radical change. But before we look at those, we should note that building new holes is nothing new for Medina. I can't think of another important course in America that's been subject to as much addition and subtraction and modification as the No. 3 course. The club was founded about 25 miles west of downtown Chicago in 1924 by a group of Shriners of the Masonic Temple, specifically the Arabic Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. The three golf courses were laid out by Tom Bendelow, a Scottish immigrant designer, one of the first to practice in the U.S., who was working out of Chicago at the time. The third course, called the No. 3, naturally, opened in 1928. This was Bendelow's routing of the course, and it was originally intended as the women's course. It was 6,200 yards and had a bit of a cramped routing with holes packed on the south side near farmland. The reason for that is pretty interesting. A group of founding members originally planned to sell portions of the No. 3 course as real estate. You can see in this earlier map of the course how these internal sections of the property were subdivided into home lots, with streets meandering through. But shortly after the course was built, those plans changed and ultimately no homes were constructed. The land that was designed for housing then, thankfully, reverted back to golf. That allowed Bendelow to rework the course in the 1930s. No. 3 had always occupied the best land, and it was the most spacious of Medina's three courses, hence the idea for real estate, and had the most rolling natural topography. Bendelow was able to take advantage of those assets by reconstructing the layout and filling in the residential gaps with new holes. It's quite an improvement and actually a really impressive routing. No. 3 went from being a real estate venture with some nice golf on it, to being viewed as the club's championship-caliber marquee venue that would host the U.S. Open just a little over a decade later in 1949. Between 1958 and 2023, nine different architects remodeled the course or added new holes, often while taking other holes out of play. There's been an almost continual rollover of style and routing revisions. It's simply in the club's nature to make changes when changes are called for. The key question at Medina has always been, how do the holes get from one side of Lake Cadizia to the other, and how do they utilize the long shoreline? It's a question that's variously been seen as either an intractable problem or one with promising possibilities. Most architects who've made contributions to Medina from Bendelow onward have essentially handled the water one way, by crossing over it with par threes. From the late 1980s up until just a few years ago, there were three one-shot holes on the course that traversed back and forth over the lake, leading to, as you might expect, a fair degree of redundancy. In previous versions of the course, the greens of these holes were buttressed against the water by bulkheads made of rust-colored corrugated metal. It was a curious industrial look that was jarring against the parkland greenery. These par threes have an interesting evolutionary story that will help us appreciate how OCM handled getting over and around the lake. Medina's 211-yard par three second has been a staple of all the course's permutations going back to 1928. It's an intimidating hole with the kind of long shot over water you really do not want to see when you've just started your round. OCM left it in place but remodeled the green complex. Bendelow's original par 3 17th hole, playing north across Lake Cadizia, had grown into a long brute, well over 200 yards. By the time the club hosted the 1975 U.S. Open, the green had become so severely sloped there were only a couple of usable hole locations. The USGA also had concerns about the 400-yard 18th hole that was not as consequential as it needed to be for a national championship and that put Medina's prospects for future U.S. Opens in doubt. So, in order to attract the 1990 U.S. Open, the club hired architect and Chicago native Roger Packard to redesign Medina's entire second nine. The biggest change was the construction of a new 17th hole relocated on the western edge of the number three property here with the green set right against the water. This hole, the old par 3 14th, went away. Bye-bye. The new 17th hole was also paired with a new 440-yard 18th hole that played through a new corridor of trees at a 45-degree angle west of the old hole. We recall the old hole started here and went up toward the clubhouse. The new 18th hole started near that 17th green and played up to a similar green site but from a different angle. These alterations necessitated a renumbering of the second nine. The old Bendalo 17th was kept in play but now was the par 3 13th hole. That meant the old 16th hole, a strong par 4 with a big tilting fairway, had to become the 12th hole. Since we're on the far side of the lake now and had to get back, a new tee was built next to the 13th green which again was the old 17th, creating a new par 5 14th that sort of ingested the former 15th hole. This was the old 15th hole which became this long par 5 over the water, now the 14th hole. That made the old 12th hole number 15 and the old 13th became the 16th leading up to the new 17th and 18th hole. So once again, the old routing was 16, 17, 18. This became 12, 13, 14, 15, par 4 16th, 17 and the 18th. Just to show how incessant Medina can be in trying to perfect our course, that 17th hole that Roger Packard built, it was remodeled twice more. First by Roger Rurich in 1997 when he pushed the green higher up onto the hillside to give it more length and a little variety and again by Reese Jones in 2003 who moved it back down to the shoreline. This is the version of Medina that OCM inherited with three fairly similar par 3s going back and forth across the lake. The old routing flowed like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, nice par 5, 8, 9, 10, another par 5 you mentioned earlier, 11, 12 toward the lake, 13 across the old 17th hole, 14, 15, 16 and then 17 and 18. The flow of holes was actually quite good despite the repetitive nature of the three par 3s. It's possible to easily reconfigure their sequencing thanks to junctions like this cool spoke in the middle of the property where several holes converge and cross. OCM kept the arrangements of holes 2 through 12 in this large triangular area relatively intact though they were renumbered. This is OCM's new routing. In the new version the par 5 10th is now the 7th so the flow goes like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, the former 10th, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18. It's this area here, holes 13 through 17 and then 18 as well, that have undergone an existential reconfiguration. The transformation introduces a completely different cadence to the routing and new holes that engage the water in more exciting ways. The first big move OCM made was to eliminate the original bendalo par 3 that was being played as the 13th hole. That green that was there since 1928 was gone. They replaced it with a new par 3 13th that runs parallel to the shore not over it so the water is on the right. This hole is also much shorter 153 yards that can also be played forward at 140 or even 120 yards to mix it up. The new 13th gives the course two things it didn't have before. A short iron or wedge par 3 and a par 3 that ran along the lake rather than over it. This section here went from three holes to two. They removed the old 14th tees across the lake to build new ones next to the 13th green to create a new slightly downhill par 4 playing into a wonderfully low green placed in what used to be the fairway of the 15th hole, another hole that OCM eliminated. They replaced the old 16th hole with the new 15th hole a majestic 514 yard par 4 that runs parallel to the 14th hole back toward the lake. The green is really impressive and sits up like a fortress. You can run shots onto it when the hole is on the left side but when pins are on the center or the right half the green requires a full aerial blind approach. It should be one of the most challenging holes at Medina. I should note here that that alteration did eliminate the old 16th hole. That was where Sergio Garcia hit one of the most famous shots in PGA Championship history in 1999 while dueling Tiger Woods. Garcia drove his ball behind a tree on the right side of the fairway and looked stymied. Somehow he managed to hit a sweeping cut from behind the tree that sailed toward the blind green and you'll recall how he sprinted up the fairway hurdle kicking into a jump to try to see where the ball ended up. That hole is gone but like I said what's there now is a much better stronger par 4. This brings us to what might be the two most exciting and consequential new holes at Medina. Ogilvy, Cocking and Mead know that diagonal shots over hazard are far more interesting than straight shots where distance control is the only criteria. Diagonal shots demand calculations. They allow shorter players to choose a line that best suits their skill and tempt longer players into maybe getting a little greedy and taking on a greater degree of risk. Either way it puts the emphasis on decision making rather than just mathematical execution. With that in mind they once and for all got rid of Medina's par 3 17th that had moved and morphed so much. In its place they introduced a short diagonal par 4, the 16th hole, that plays over the lake at an angle to the fairway that runs tight along the water. The tees are in the same spot as the old 17th tees and can be stretched to over 400 yards. It's a good hole from that distance but one where the professionals and most good players will most likely hit irons and seven woods just to find a safe spot in the fairway. But as the hole gets shorter it becomes more tantalizing. I expect that during tournaments the tees will be moved up far enough to bring the green into play to entice players to make a hard decision about pulling driver. From this forward tee it's just about 300 yards to the front edge of the green so depending on the standing of the match or the tournament round most players will want to go for it. Obviously the miss is on land rather than in the water so this back bunker is going to see a lot of action. By the end of the tournament the rakes are going to be worn down to their nubs. This is a fun hole to play no matter your skill set and it's going to be fascinating to watch how professionals handle this pressure packed tee shot. You'd expect to see plenty of birdies but a few car crashes too. OCM used the same diagonal concept for their new par 3 17th cutting back over the lake in the opposite direction. It can stretch out to over 200 yards so it's a similar distance to the previous versions of the 17th hole but the angle coming into the green from the right makes it a more thoughtful hole than when the play was a simple frontal assault. Now players have to think a lot harder about not just the carry distance but also their line. If they pull the ball just a little their tee shots can bound down the slope in front of the green and possibly into the water. They'll also have to assess how aggressive it'll be shooting at the different hole locations. How much will they challenge front hole locations especially that front left flag. There's really not a safe bailout either. It's going to be much more of a grind for players when they stand on that tee. What moving the penultimate hole back across the water also does is add yardage to the 18th hole. Now with a drive that plays back across the lake OCM shifted 18th back into the corridor where it was from 1928 through the late 1980s before Packard shifted it west in an effort to toughen it up. The move buys almost 50 extra yards lengthening it to 487 yards with a fairway that swerves through a channel of bunkers. Members play it as a par 5 but it will likely be played as a par 4 in tournaments. So let's add it up on the lakeside holes. Previously Medina had three par threes that all confronted Lake Khadija head-on and one long hole that crossed it off the tee. After the OCM remodel the course has two very different par threes moving in opposite directions. A short sporty par 3 that plays along the side of the lake. A risk-reward diagonal par 4 that's potentially drivable for long hitters and a revamped 18th hole that's now 50 yards longer than before. It's pretty clear that the new design gets far more out of the shoreline than any previous version of Medina. And the inland holes also present more engaging strategies and options. We've covered Medina's architectural and layout changes and how they expand the way the course can play versus the way it did before. But there's one final thing to know at least for the 2026 President's Cup. As we've seen in match play team events several times since the 2016 Ryder Cup at Hazeltine National, the PGA Tour and PGA of America often like to rejigger the routing of their courses to ensure that matches aren't over before the teams and players get to the most exciting holes, usually at the end of the round. For the 2026 President's Cup each group starts on hole 5. A lovely downhill par 5 for members making the long par 4 fourth with a tough uphill approach shot into the green the President's Cup's 18th hole. This will put those critical and fun swing holes we've just discussed into the middle of the round where they can have the biggest impact. The robust par 4 15th will play as the 11th. The new risk reward par 4 will be the 12th and the new par 3 back across the water will be hole 13. It also places that intimidating par 3 second hole across the lake as the 16th hole ensuring that it will be a knee-knocking late game factor in many of the matches. Tight penal courses with a lot of trees, what Medina used to be, can make for intense low scoring tournaments but when players are all hitting the same types of shots over and over it's not always the most exciting golf to watch. Courses like the old Medina could extract bogeys from even the best players and tended to crown champions who hit the ball the straightest but the transformed version of the course is accessible to a far wider range of golfer and challenges them in a more right-brained way. It brings into play creativity, thoughtfulness, risk assessment and short game flexibility. At over 7,500 yards tournament players still have to be strong drivers but if they're errant they have options to recover. The pressure of a major or a president's cup or a club championship or your Saturday match is going to be there whether players are threading drives through dark hallways of oaks or if they have room to gamble and work magic but let's face it for those of us watching at least you want to see some gambling. That's what Medina, the new Medina, now offers. Thanks for watching if there's another great hole you'd like to see us break down please let us know in the comments below.