By Jeff Williams

Golf is large in Chicago, and nowhere more so than at the site of the 81st PGA Championship

There is something muscular, massive, about Chicago. From the peaks of its skyscrapers to the sprawl of its suburbs to the spread of its infamous airport, O’Hare, Chicago fills the landscape, and the imagination.

The poet Carl Sandburg had it right about Chicago when he wrote:
Hog-Butcher to the World,
Tool-maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler,
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.

In all manner of things, Chicago is big. Golf is no exception.

The PGA of America was thinking big when it decided to bring the 81st PGA Championship to the Medinah Country Club this August. Medinah is one of the biggest golf facilities in the world, with three courses and a mammoth clubhouse. It’s No. 3 Course, which has played host to U.S. Opens and Western Opens, will stretch to 7,401 yards, making it the longest course in major championship history.

Medinah, like Chicago itself, has big shoulders.

Every where you look on the Chicago horizon, golf has big shoulders.

The Olympia Fields Country Club, founded in 1915, once had four courses, though it is now down to two. But its clubhouse is the biggest in the game, with 352,000 square feet under roof. It has two ballrooms, just in case of the need to stage an extra debutante ball. Olympia Fields has played host to a U.S. Open, a Senior Open, two PGA Championships and five Western Opens.

The Cog Hill public golf complex has four courses, including the Dubsdread Course that has become the permanent site of the Motorola Western Open. Cog Hill and several other public facilities in Chicago are owned by Joe Jemsek, the king of upscale public golf in America, a very big man.

And, if the Chicago Golf Club has only one course and a modest clubhouse, it plays a big role in this nation’s golf history. Designed by C.B. Macdonald in 1891, Chicago Golf is thought to be the first club with an 18-hole course, over which three early U.S. Opens were staged. In concept and construction, Chicago Golf Club was a very big accomplishment for its day.

Five other greater Chicago clubs have hosted the U.S. Open - Onwentsia Club, North Shore Country Club, Midlothian Country Club, Skokie Country Club, and the Glen View Club - making a total of eight Open host sites.

The Western Golf Association, headquartered in Chicago, runs the Motorola Western Open, the second oldest tournament on the PGA tour next to the U.S. Open itself. The WGA’s Evans Scholars Foundation is the largest caddie scholarship fund in the world, currently providing funds to 860 students. More than 5,700 Evans Scholars have graduated from colleges.

Because Chicago golf is so big and so central to the game in America, Joel Hirsch has no trouble describing it in large and glowing terms. Hirsch has been a prominent amateur player for years, during which he has seen all there is to see, has experienced all there is to experience, about golf in Chicago - and the world, for that matter.

“I think Chicago is the backbone of the nation’s golf,” says Hirsch. “You’ve got a bunch of wonderful private clubs along with equally wonderful public facilities. You’ve got clubs for every pocketbook and every style of play. We have fabulous nationally-ranked courses. If you were looking for a championship golf course, it would be difficult to beat Medinah No. 3 anywhere.”

When it comes to thinking big about golf, the founders of Medinah Country Club clearly had visions of grandeur. They were Shriners, Nobles of the Mystic Shrine of North America, members of the Medinah Temple, and they wanted no less than a temple to the game of golf. They purchased 650 acres of land 30 miles west of Chicago’s Lake Michigan waterfront and set about creating a wonderland of golf courses, polo fields and bridle paths, with their own Great Lake in the middle of it - Lake Kadijah. That was in 1923. While the Shriners no longer play a major role in the club, their grand vision remains its driving force.

“This is a great club with a great golf course and we are really proud of it,” says Al Reitz Jr., Medinah’s president. “After we had the 1975 U.S. Open here, a lot of members thought that, because this is such a great club, we should be sharing it with the world from time to time.”

Medinah has a lot to share. It’s three golf course, originally designed by Scotsman Tom Bendelow, are prime examples of park land golf. Owing to the Shriners Middle Eastern origins, there is a sand bunker in the shape of a camel a few yards off the first tee of the No. 1 Course. There are more than 18,000 trees on the property, and Medinah’s staff of 350 people includes a full time arborist. Lake Kadijah, named after the wife of the Prophet Mohammed, is a hazard whose treachery is masked by its beauty.

Then there is the clubhouse, an edifice unlike any other in golf. Designed by Richard Schmid, a Shriner himself, it is 60,000 square feet of Byzantine, Oriental, Italianate and Louis XIV architecture that took four years to build for the then mind-boggling sum of $600,000. Just two years ago, the entire structure was renovated at a cost of $10,000,000.

As you enter the Medinah grounds, the huge brick building with its central rotunda and faux minarets looms ethereally over the landscape, making it possible to ignore portions of the No. 3 Course that might otherwise capture the arriving eye. The entrance hall rotunda is 60 feet high, its walls and ceilings covered with the fanciful paintings of Gustav A. Brand. Instead of entering a golf club, you get the feeling of checking into the Coral Gables Biltmore.

But make no mistake about it: Medinah, for all its frills and fancies, is a fiercely proud golf club. The No. 3 Course has been the site of three U.S. Opens (1949, 1975,1990), three Western Opens (1939, 1962, 1966), and a U.S. Senior Open (1988) - not bad for a course opened in 1928 primarily as a playground for Medinah’s women golfers.

It was soon determined that the prodigious carries over Lake Kadijah dictated by Bendelow’s design did not suit the female game. The members then decided that the course should be the club’s championship layout and brought Bendelow back to redesign it, the first of several revisions over its 70-year history. When his par-70, 6,261-yard version was reopened in 1929, the club staged a Medinah Open over 36 holes to showcase it. The result appalled the members, Harry “Lighthorse” Cooper winning the $3,000 top money by shooting a seven-under-par 63 in the afternoon after a morning 73. To add insult to injury, Gene Sarazen had toured around the second time in 65.

Back came Bendelow for another revamp, beginning a stretching process that took the course over a period of years to nearly 7,000 yards with, ultimately, seven completely new holes. Writing in the club’s periodical, The Camel Trail, member Arthur B. Sweet commented that the toughened layout “gives me the shakes. Let Mr. Harry Cooper try to shoot a 63 over this new course. It will never be done - never. “ And he was right: in 1935, in winning a 72-hole benefit tournament for the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children, Cooper’s score was 289, one over par. It did not feature a 63.

Fittingly, a club with Medinah’s grand visions sought big-name players as its professionals: Abe Espinosa, Tommy Armour and Ralph Guldahl, the latter two U.S. Open winners, were among its early professionals. The club sought the best tournaments, too. In 1937 it hosted the Chicago Open, putting up the then hugmongous purse of $10,000, with Sarazen the winner. Byron Nelson took the first Western Open at Medinah in 1939 with a score of six-under-par 282, then returned after World War II to claim the Chicago Victory Open with a nine-under-par total of 279, good enough to defeat a field including Ben Hogan, Lloyd Mangrum and Chandler Harper.

So proud of No. 3 were the members that an invitation was issued to the United States Golf Association to play the National Open over the course in 1949, the year of the club’s silver anniversary. Cary Middlecoff won the championship, defeating Sam Snead and Clayton Heafner by a stroke with a 286, or two over the then par of 71. After Western Opens in 1962 (won by Jackie Cupit) and 1966 (won by Billy Casper), Medinah hosted its second U.S. Open in 1975, with Lou Graham defeating John Mahaffey in an 18-hole playoff.

Change came to No. 3 after the 1975 Open, as change has always been part of the club’s history.

“We have always tried to improve our golf courses, particularly No. 3,” says club president Reitz, who has been around Medinah since 1950 when his father first joined. “We’ve always wanted the course to be tough but fair. Change is part of the Medinah tradition.”

When Medinah made a bid to host its third U.S. Open, the U.S.G.A. said it would only consider the offer if the club did something about No. 3’s 18th hole. By then, the closer - a short par four doglegging abruptly to the right - had become a bit of an embarrassment. For instance, the late PGA champion and television commentator, Dave Marr, once described it as “the only finishing hole in championship golf where you have to put the ball in play with a dive slice.”

The bid for a third Open was led by member Les Klenk, a man deeply in love with both golf and Medinah. Klenk and his friends wanted the championship badly enough to build a new 18th hole and make other changes, and also to host a U.S. Senior Open as a trial run. Redoing the course was an expensive endeavor. Under a plan drawn by architect Roger Packard, the number 18 was lengthened and turned into a dogleg left. Because the green of the 17th hole, a par three over Lake Kadijah, was so far from the new 18th tee, a new 17th hole was built. Number 14 was also changed, to a long par five from a shortish par four. Various less drastic alterations were made to the back nine, with the total cost of the revamp exceeding $1,000,000, raised by a $1,200-per-member assessment.

Klenk’s charge for the 1990 U.S. Open was one of the great saga’s in Medinah history. Because the club’s by-laws stipulated that any expenditure of more than $100,000 must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the membership, a special meeting had to be called. On July 14, 1984, Klenk’s proposal did not gain the necessary two thirds majority. But he would not be dissuaded.

That September, Klenk called in the U.S.G.A.’s then executive director, Frank Hannigan, to speak to the membership in Medinah’s ornate ballroom, a pep talk of sorts. Two weeks later, Klenk, called Hannigan with the news that he had obtained the two thirds majority, and that the new and improved Medinah No. 3 would be delighted to host both the 1988 Senior Open and the 1990 U.S. Open. What Klenk didn’t say was how he managed to garner that two thirds majority.

The accepted version goes something like this.

When the costly proposal to alter the course was put up for a second vote, it still did not get the necessary majority, at which point a number of the nay-sayers, thinking the issue had been put to rest, left the room. But, under parliamentary rules, the meeting had not yet been officially concluded. When one of the members then asked that his vote be reconsidered - a ploy - a new vote was required. With enough of the nay-sayers having gone to play golf or whatever, the remaining electorate achieved a slim majority. Klenk had pressed and won the bet, but sadly he didn’t live to see the culmination of his effort, dying at age 70 in 1989. The members, by the way, got their assessments back from the proceeds of the two championships.

Gary Player won the Senior Open in 1988, though the old guys didn’t play the course anywhere near its full championship length. There is a story about that Open that speaks to the passion of the Medinah membership for their No. 3 course. Liking to play the course at nearly its full length for the big club tournaments, such as the Medinah Classic in mid-June, the members were disdainful of the short course set up for the seniors. Accordingly, when a player inquired during a practice round as to the location of the women’s tees, a member replied, “You’re playing from them.”

The 1990 Open was won by Hale Irwin in dramatic fashion. At 45 years of age and twice an Open winner, Irwin was playing on a special exemption extended to him by the U.S.G.A. On Sunday he holed one of the most critical and improbable putts in championship golf, a 45-footer at the 18th hole that eventually tied him with Mike Donald. Irwin won the next day, making birdie on the first extra hole of the playoff.

Irwin and Donald shot 72-hole totals of eight-under-par 272, with the course playing at par 70, and the members were not happy. For some, it was another Harry Cooper-type drubbing of their treasured real estate. Worse, they felt that the U.S.G.A.’s director of competitions, the late P.J. Boatwright, had compromised the course after players complained of excessively difficult conditions early in the week.

“The course was tough but fair, which is what we always wanted it to be,” recalls Reitz. “Then Mr. Boatwright decided that it was too tough. He had the rough cut, the tee markers moved up, and the greens slowed down. I don’t know if the course played as long as 7,000 yards. I do know they didn’t play it from the back yardage plates in most cases. The members were disappointed.”

That disappointment was the catalyst in bringing another major championship to Medinah, this time the PGA.

“It was a nearly unanimous vote to bring the PGA here,” says Reitz. “After talking with the PGA, we had the confidence that they would play the course the way it’s intended to play. The greens will be fast, the rough will be tough, and the tee-markers will be at the plates, seventy-four-oh-one, just like we play it.”

As change is part of the club’s tradition, significant and, inevitably, controversial - changes have been made for the PGA. With architect Roger Rulerich overseeing the work, the 17th green has been moved some 40 yards up and off lake Kadijah, and the first green, which had a trough running through its center, has been flattened and extended on the right side to accept more pin positions. Also, the severely pitched greens of the second and 13th holes have been moderated slightly and a hump in the 16th green has been flattened. The net result is that, after 70 years of changes, only the 11th green remains as it was on Tom Bendelow’s original No. 3.

What has not changed, of course, is that Medinah No. 3 is defined by its trees. All the Medinah courses were built primarily through an oak forest, and the natural stands of trees have been supplemented over the years by aggressive planting programs, frequently Medinah in honor of deceased members. For instance, a tree in memoriam to Al Reitz’s father rises from the right rough of No. 3’s 15th hole, a small plaque attached to its trunk.

“Every tree is tagged, and they are all on a computer,” says Reitz. “Management of the forest is very important to this club. You can pull in here on a hot day and the temperature seems to drop a couple of degrees. It’s because of the trees, I’m sure.”

Hale Irwin hasn’t been back to Medinah since his Open victory, but he remembers the trees. “The trees tell you everything about Medinah,” he says. “You sure don’t want to be in them, but at the same time they can be an aid in formulating your shot. You work the ball off the trees. You pick one out, or a clump of them, and try to draw or fade shots. You just better do what you’re trying to do, or you’ll be among them. And it’s awful tough to make par from there.”

The PGA’s defending champion is Vijay Singh, who won his first major on the tightly tree lined fairways of the Sahalee Country in suburban Seattle last August. Sahalee isn’t as long as Medinah, and Medinah isn’t as narrow as Sahalee. Singh doesn’t think that the contestants in the 81st PGA Championship will be intimidated by Medinah’s length. “Nowadays just about everyone on tour hits it a long way, so the yardage doesn’t really come into play,” said Singh after a practice round at Medinah. “I think the key to this golf course, apart from its length, is putting the ball in play. If you hit driver, you’ve got to be really accurate otherwise you run out of fairway on the dogleg holes. If it gets fast and hard, I think you’ll see a lot of 1-irons and 2-irons off the tee, even on the longer holes. This golf course, you can’t let up.”

The PGA of America is so impressed with Medinah that it will bring its championship back to No. 3 in 2006, and the Ryder Cup Matches in 2011. “Chicago is the kind of town you want to be in,” says PGA of America CEO Jim Awtrey. “Medinah is a great club and Chicago is a great area for golf. The level of interest there is extremely high, which is great for us.”

Chicago has big shoulders. Medinah has big shoulders.