Whistling Straits Review

Whistling Straits is the most convincing piece of make believe in American golf. The site was a flat abandoned airfield, and Dye pushed it into dunes, ridges and blowouts until it read as a windswept Irish coastline, then filled it with something north of a thousand bunkers, many of them decorative and several of them famous for the wrong reasons. On the ground it plays big and it plays hard. The par three seventeenth out over the lake and the closing stretch along the bluff are genuinely great holes, the wind off Lake Michigan is a constant rather than an occasional visitor, and from the back tees at close to seven thousand eight hundred yards it is unplayable for a normal golfer.

The architecture divides critics and it should. There is more artifice here than at any course ranked near it, the bunkering is decoration as often as strategy, and the design grade sits below the overall for exactly that reason while the rest of the experience carries the card. Conditioning is immaculate every day of the season. The lake is the scenery, wide and cold and always in view. Walking is compulsory, caddies are close to it, and you have to book a room at a resort property to get a tee time, which pushes the true cost of a round far past the four hundred dollars a shoulder season tee time runs.

The resort publishes no rack rate at all, and a peak summer round costs a good deal more than that. Play it once from the right tees and you will not forget it.