One of the premier clubs in the American Midwest, Oakland Hills Country Club has hosted nine major championships and is slated for two U.S. Opens (2034 and 2051) and U.S. Women’s Opens (2031 and 2042). The club got started when its founder Joe Mack and a group of other members discovered an ideal golf property in 1916 and quickly hired Donald Ross. It’s believed that Ross was hired because of his ongoing construction work at Detroit Golf Club, where he was building 36 holes at the time and where Mack was a member. Ross was immediately enamored with the Oakland Hills site, saying, “The lord intended for this to be a golf course.” His South Course, completed in 1918, hosted the 1922 Western Open and two U.S. Opens before Robert Trent Jones’s landmark 1951 redesign. Jones’s work, spurred by concerns of low scoring at the 1937 U.S. Open, created the course that Ben Hogan dubbed “The Monster” and that established Jones as “The Open Doctor.” The Monster remained intact for seven decades before Gil Hanse was commissioned to restore Ross’s design in 2019. While this restoration was not met with unanimous praise within the club, it helped the South Course at Oakland Hills return to the ranks of the best golf courses in the country.

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Take Note…

The key to restoring the greens. The club had a copy of the program for the 1929 U.S. Women’s Amateur, won by the great Glenna Collett. This program contained remarkable photos of all of Donald Ross’s original greens, which Gil Hanse’s team used as a reference point for their work. We have included a 1929 photo of each green in the hole-by-hole section below.

The 15th and 16th greens. These two greens are Robert Trent Jones designs, remaining from his 1951 overhaul. Hanse and the club deemed the original 15th green too severe and believed the RTJ effort to be quite good. As for the 16th, much of the strategy of the Ross hole was restored, but the green was not, partly thanks to the iconic status of Gary Player’s shot into it in the 1972 PGA Championship.

The seventh green. Prior to Hanse’s historical renovation, the South Course’s seventh hole had seen its green move to the right and a pond installed. In the process of attempting to restore the hole to its original form, Blake Conant, a shaper on the project, located the original green pad in the rough, with a cart path running through it. This discovery made recapturing the Ross hole a far easier task.

The second time is the charm. Hanse’s first master plan, submitted in 2016, failed to pass a club vote. Two years later, after lobbying efforts by the green committee within the club, a revised plan for the historical renovation finally passed. In the meantime, many other prominent clubs had decided to move away from the Jones philosophy and restore their courses, so Oakland Hills members were no doubt aware that the club would fall behind the times if they didn’t act.