Medinah Country Club

Medinah Country Club's No. 3 course has hosted three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, and a Ryder Cup — a tournament hosting record that puts it in the small group of American clubs that have been on the major rotation across three different generations. Tom Bendelow designed the original routing in 1925 for a Chicago Shriners club that wanted a championship-grade venue west of the city, and the course has been redesigned and lengthened several times since — most recently by Rees Jones in advance of the 2012 Ryder Cup. The site is unusual among Midwest championship venues in that the routing climbs through significant forest canopy and uses elevation changes more characteristic of mountain golf than of the Illinois prairie.

No. 3 plays around 7,700 yards par 72 from the championship markers, with a slope in the upper 140s. The seventeenth hole — a 195-yard par-3 across Lake Kadijah, which sits in the middle of the property — is the routing's iconic image and the hole that has decided several of the major championships staged there. Hale Irwin won the 1990 U.S. Open at the seventeenth; Tiger Woods won the 1999 and 2006 PGAs at the same hole. The 2012 Ryder Cup at Medinah produced "the Miracle at Medinah" — Europe came back from 10-6 down on Sunday to win 14.5-13.5, in the largest singles-day reversal in Cup history.

Medinah is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The club operates three courses — No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 — but No. 3 is the championship routing and the focus of all major-rotation hosting. The membership skews toward Chicago-area corporate and professional families with multi-generation ties to the club.

The Illinois climate gives Medinah a playing season of April through October, with the firmest conditions in September and October. The forest canopy keeps the routing cooler in mid-summer than the surrounding prairie courses by a measurable margin. The course closes through Illinois winter and reopens when the soil thaws.