Shinnecock Hills Golf Club Review

The club dates to 1891 and the Stanford White clubhouse above the eighteenth is the oldest in the country, but the golf course is Flynn's, built in 1931 on sandy ground between Peconic Bay and the Atlantic. What makes it great is the routing. Holes run in every direction across the property, so the wind never lets a player settle into one shot shape, and the fescue covering everything off the fairway is thin enough to find a ball in and thick enough to make the next swing a guess.

The greens sit on natural shelves and shed anything struck without spin. Coore and Crenshaw widened the fairways back to Flynn's lines from 2012, which sounds generous and is not, because width here only means more angles to get wrong. The USGA lost control of the setup in 2018 and spent a Saturday apologising for it, then got it right in June 2026, when Wyndham Clark led from the front for four days through fog and heavy wind and won at four under.

As a piece of design it belongs in any conversation about the best course in America. As somewhere to play golf it is closed: the membership is small, there is no guest rate, and a U.S. Open every dozen years is as near as most people get.