Medinah Country Club No. 3 Review

Bendelow routed three courses on this Illinois property for a Shriners club in the 1920s and No. 3 opened in 1928. Its record has always been heavier than its reputation. Three U.S. Opens have been played here, won by Cary Middlecoff in 1949, Lou Graham in 1975 and Hale Irwin in 1990, Tiger Woods took both the 1999 and the 2006 PGA Championships, and the 2012 Ryder Cup ended with Europe coming from ten to six down on the final morning to win by a single point.

What the course never had was much standing as architecture. Roger Packard rebuilt it in 1986, Rees Jones stretched it to 7,561 yards for the 2006 PGA, the longest course a major had used to that point, and the answer to every problem was more length and more trees. Then the 2019 BMW Championship, during which the course record was tied or set four separate times, showed that length had stopped working.

So the club handed the whole thing to Ogilvy Cocking Mead, took it back to bare ground and reopened in 2024 with something genuinely different: larger greens, bunkers built at Melbourne sand belt scale, fairways wide enough to make angles matter again, broad fescue rough where the tree line used to stand, and open vistas in place of the trees that closed the view in. Three par threes still cross Lake Kadijah, at the second, the thirteenth and the seventeenth, and they are the holes anyone photographs.

The Presidents Cup is played here from 24 to 27 September 2026, with Geoff Ogilvy captaining the International side on a course his own firm drew. Conditioning that week will be flawless. Access will not be. Medinah is a private club of more than eleven hundred members, and there is no visitor rate at any price.