Whistling Straits

Whistling Straits is unusual among American championship courses in that the property had no golf history before Pete Dye routed it in 1998. Herb Kohler bought the land — two miles of Lake Michigan bluff in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin — and asked Dye to build the course he had been describing as a hypothetical inland-links project for years. Dye treated the entire property as a sand-bunker exercise: he routed eighteen holes through artificially-created dunes and counted more than a thousand bunkers on the finished course. There are no rake stations; the bunkers play as natural waste areas, which contributed to the 2021 PGA Championship ruling on Dustin Johnson's stance penalty at the eighteenth.

The course plays around 7,500 yards from the championship markers, par 72, and uses Lake Michigan as the right-side boundary for most of the back nine. Whistling Straits has hosted three PGA Championships — 2004 (Vijay Singh), 2010 (Martin Kaymer over Bubba Watson in a playoff), and 2015 (Jason Day at twenty under, a championship scoring record) — and the 2021 Ryder Cup, where the U.S. won 19-9 in the largest margin of the modern era. The seventeenth, called Pinched Nerve, is a par-3 of variable length depending on tee setup that plays directly along the Lake Michigan bluff. The eighteenth, Dyeabolical, is a 520-yard par-4 with the famous waste-bunker stance that decided the 2010 championship.

Whistling Straits is part of Destination Kohler and is open to resort guests at premium daily-fee rates. The property includes a second course, the Irish, which sits on the inland side of the road and plays as a faux-Irish-links rather than the lakeshore links of the Straits. Caddies are available; the resort policy is walking-only on the Straits course.

Wisconsin lakeshore climate gives Whistling Straits a longer season than the inland Wisconsin courses — the lake moderates temperatures into October. Frost delays still affect early tee times through May and again in autumn. The prime window is mid-July through September.