There is a putt in golf history that a five foot putt has no business being. Martin Kaymer, Sunday evening, September 30, 2012, on the eighteenth green at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago. He made it. Europe won the Ryder Cup after being buried 10-6 going into the last day, and the place has been called the Miracle at Medinah ever since.
That is the thing most golfers remember about Medinah, and it is a perfectly good thing to remember. But it is maybe the fourth most interesting story attached to this golf course, and this week the Presidents Cup is being played there, September 24 through 27, which makes it a good time to go through the rest of them.
Here is what Medinah actually is, why the golf world keeps going back, what happened there before 2012, and why the course the players walk onto this week is not really the course anybody remembers.
First, Where It Is And What It Is
Medinah Country Club sits in the village of Medinah, Illinois, in DuPage County, out in the western suburbs past O'Hare. Call it a half hour from downtown Chicago on a good day, which is not most days.
It was founded in 1924 by the Medinah Shriners, the Chicago chapter of a fraternal order with a taste for the theatrical, and they were not subtle about it. They named the club after the city in Saudi Arabia. Then they put up a 120,000 square foot clubhouse with a dome on it, modeled on the architecture of its namesake, designed by a charter member who had trained at MIT and spent his career building Moorish revival temples for the Shrine. Nobody has ever driven up that entrance road and thought they were at a normal golf club.
Then they built three eighteen hole golf courses, all of them by Tom Bendelow, a Scot who laid out an almost unbelievable number of American courses in the early part of the century. Number One opened in 1925. Number Two in 1926. Number Three in 1928.
Number Three is the one you have heard of.
The Best Detail In The Whole Story
Course Number Three, the one that has hosted five major championships and is about to host its second international team event, was originally built as the ladies course.
That is not a joke and it is not an exaggeration. The Shriners had two courses for the men and wanted a third, gentler one for the women of the club. Then the women found it too hard, the men found it more interesting than what they already had, and within a few years the whole plan had quietly reversed itself. The short course for the ladies turned into one of the most punishing tests in American golf.
Twenty one years after it opened it hosted a United States Open. It has been getting toughened up, stretched out, and argued about ever since.
Five Majors, And Every One Of Them Has A Story
Number Three has hosted three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, and a U.S. Senior Open. That is a heavier résumé than most people realize.
1949 U.S. Open. Cary Middlecoff wins, and Medinah goes on the map as a championship venue for good.
1975 U.S. Open. Lou Graham wins after a playoff.
1988 U.S. Senior Open. Gary Player.
1990 U.S. Open. This is the one to know. Hale Irwin comes to the 72nd hole needing something and rolls in a birdie putt from roughly forty five feet, and then does something nobody had really seen a grown man in slacks do at a U.S. Open. He runs a full lap of the green high fiving the gallery. It is still one of the great pieces of footage in the sport. That putt got him into an eighteen hole playoff with Mike Donald, they tied that too, and it went to the first sudden death hole in U.S. Open history. Irwin birdied it. At forty five he became the oldest U.S. Open champion there has ever been, and it was his third.
1999 PGA Championship. Tiger Woods, twenty three years old, wins his second major by one shot. But the shot everybody replays is not his. A nineteen year old Sergio Garcia, ball jammed up against the trunk of a red oak on the sixteenth, green completely out of sight, closes his eyes, swings as hard as he can, somehow slings it onto the putting surface, and then sprints up the fairway doing a scissor kick in midair to see where it finished. It made him a star in about six seconds.
2006 PGA Championship. Tiger again, this time by five. Two PGA Championships at the same course, same winner, seven years apart.
What Happened To The Sergio Tree
Short version. It became a tourist attraction, and it did not survive being one.
For ten years, members and guests kept walking over to that red oak on sixteen, dropping a ball against the trunk, and trying the shot. Some of them with their eyes closed. You cannot hit a golf ball out of the base of a tree several thousand times without consequences, and between the abuse and its own declining health the tree was removed in 2009.
There is something very golf about that. The most famous shot in the course's modern history destroyed the object that made it famous.
The Miracle At Medinah, Properly Told
Now back to 2012, because the details matter more than the headline.
Davis Love III captained the United States. José María Olazábal captained Europe, and he was playing the whole week as a tribute to Seve Ballesteros, who had died the year before. Europe's bags and Sunday shirts carried the silhouette of Seve celebrating his 1984 Open win, and the team wore his navy and white on the final day. If you want to understand why European teams get emotional about this event, that week is the answer key.
The Americans were excellent for two days. After Saturday it was 10-6, and 10-6 going into singles is, historically, over. A team needs eight and a half of the twelve Sunday points to come back from that, and nobody had done it on American soil.
Two things swung it. The first happened Saturday evening in the last fourball match on the course. Ian Poulter and Rory McIlroy were two down with six to play against Jason Dufner and Zach Johnson, and Poulter simply made five birdies in a row to finish, won the match one up, and turned what would have been 11-5 into 10-6. That single point is the difference between a hopeless Sunday and a possible one.
The second was the Sunday itself. Europe took eight and a half of twelve. Justin Rose beat Phil Mickelson one up in a match he had no business winning. And then Kaymer, a man who had barely played all week, holed the five footer on eighteen to beat Steve Stricker and put Europe on fourteen. Final score 14½ to 13½.
Fourteen years later, American players still get asked about it. That is the room the Presidents Cup walks into this week.
The Course They Are Playing Is Not The Course You Remember
This is the part most people watching on television will not know, and it changes how the week looks.
Medinah closed Course Number Three in 2023 and spent roughly $23.5 million rebuilding it. The work was done by OCM Golf, the Australian firm of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead, and it reopened in July 2024.
It was not a touch up. They took out hundreds of trees, tore up the narrow tree lined corridors that defined the place for fifty years, built three new holes, and reworked the whole thing in the spirit of the Melbourne Sand Belt courses the firm grew up on. Width instead of corridors. Angles and strategy instead of a hallway with rough on both sides. The idea was to get back closer to the scale Bendelow originally had in mind, before decades of tree planting and U.S. Open setups squeezed it shut.
It now plays 7,657 yards to a par of 72. There are three par threes across the water of Lake Kadijah, including the seventeenth, which is a 197 yard carry with nowhere sensible to bail out. If the matches are close on Sunday afternoon, that is the hole to be watching.
And The Architect Is Captaining One Of The Teams
Here is the wrinkle that makes this week genuinely unusual.
Geoff Ogilvy, whose firm redesigned this golf course, is the captain of the International team. Brandt Snedeker has the United States. So one captain spent years walking every inch of this property deciding where the trouble goes, and the other one gets to find out.
Whether that is worth anything is a fair question. Knowing where you wanted a bunker to be does not help your team hole a six footer. But it is the sort of detail that will get mentioned about nine hundred times on the broadcast, so you may as well know the story behind it.
The Americans have won ten in a row in this event, which is the real reason the Presidents Cup fights for attention against the Ryder Cup. A team competition needs both teams to win sometimes. Medinah is a course where the favorite has been beaten before, and everyone involved knows it.
Why This One Matters If You Live Out Here
More of our orders come from the Midwest than from anywhere else. Not by a little. It is our single biggest region, and it is not particularly close.
Midwest golf spends most of the year being treated as the place tournaments pass through on the way somewhere warmer. The schedule lives in Florida, Arizona, California and the Carolinas. We get a short season, a hard winter, and the distinct sense that the sport happens elsewhere.
So a week like this one counts for more here than it does in Palm Beach. The whole sport looks at a golf course in DuPage County for four days, in late September, when the leaves are turning and every course within an hour is running its best conditions of the year. That is worth something. It is also perfectly timed, because it lands in the exact stretch where everybody around here is trying to squeeze the last rounds in before the carts get parked.
One More Chicago Footnote
While we are here. The greatest golf comedy ever made is a Chicago story too.
Caddyshack was directed by Harold Ramis and written by Ramis, Brian Doyle-Murray and Douglas Kenney, and it came straight out of the Murray brothers caddying at Indian Hill Club up in Winnetka. Half the characters were real people from that caddie yard. The film itself was shot in Florida, which is its own small tragedy, but the material is North Shore Chicago through and through.
So this week the sport's biggest event is at a Chicago club, and the sport's funniest movie came out of a Chicago caddie shack about forty minutes north of it. Not a bad run for one metro area.
What To Wear While You Watch It
Worth saying plainly, because people get this backwards. Our graphic tees are not course gear. Almost every course in America wants a collar on you at the first tee, so these are for the rest of the day. The couch, the bar, the garage, the drive home, the part of Sunday where the singles matches are on and nobody is going anywhere. If you need a collar for the round itself, that is what the polos are for.
Ours run $29.99, which is about a sleeve of balls.
For an American team event, the flag shirts do the obvious job. USA Flag Clubs And Stars is the cleanest of them. USA Flag Clubs And Balls and USA Flag Golfer are the other two, and all three read as golf first and patriotic second, which is the right order.
Caddyshack Rules is the Chicago pick this week for all the reasons above, and the rest of that lane lives in Caddyshack. Back Nine is the correct shirt for a Sunday singles session, since the entire event gets decided on back nines. Here For A Good Time covers the viewing position of anyone who does not have a rooting interest and is mostly in it for the company.
If you are hosting, Glizzy At The Turn and We Ride At Dawn both get more laughs from a room than they have any right to, and a Worm Burner towel makes an oddly good gift for the buddy who is driving out to Medinah for a practice round. The rest are in Golf Towels.
Late September in the Midwest also means the morning is fifty degrees and the afternoon is not, so the hoodies and long sleeves are doing real work right now.
Watch It Properly
Thursday through Sunday, September 24 to 27. Snedeker and the Americans going for eleven straight. Ogilvy and the Internationals trying to make it a competition again, on a golf course Ogilvy himself drew up.
And underneath all of it, a course that started life as the ladies course in 1928, produced Hale Irwin's lap of the green, Sergio's shot from behind a tree that no longer exists, two Tiger majors, and the single most famous comeback in Ryder Cup history. That is a lot of history for one piece of ground in DuPage County.
The full lineup lives in The Tee Box, with the newest ones in New Arrivals. We have been making shirts for golfers since 2025, and a Chicago golf week is about as on brand as it gets around here.
Set something up for Sunday afternoon. That is the one worth clearing the calendar for.
See you tomorrow.
Dan
Shanked Right
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