The Medinah Shriners founded their club in 1924 on old farmland west of Chicago, and they wanted more than golf. Early on there was a ski jump and a toboggan slide, so the club was alive even in winter. Course No. 3 opened in 1928, a Tom Bendelow routing laid across sweeping ridges that seemed made for landing zones and green pads. It was designed at first for the club's women members. That gentle beginning did not last long. In the 1930 Medinah Open, Harry Cooper shot 63, and the course spent decades answering him. Bendelow rebuilt eight holes almost at once, and Harry Collis went on toughening the layout through the 1930s. After that came decade after decade of shifting and rebuilding. William Langford is believed to have worked here, and George Fazio too, and perhaps A.W. Tillinghast, whom the PGA of America sent to clubs in the late 1930s to advise on cutting maintenance costs. Roger Packard reshaped routing and greens in 1986. Rees Jones stretched the course to 7,561 yards for the 2006 PGA Championship, at the time the longest course in major history, and built a driveable 15th for the 2012 Ryder Cup. The roll of champions is long. Byron Nelson won the Western Open here in 1939. Cary Middlecoff and Lou Graham claimed the U.S. Opens of 1949 and 1975, and Hale Irwin won in 1990. Gary Player took the 1988 U.S. Senior Open. Tiger Woods won the PGA twice here. In 1999 he held off a teenage Sergio Garcia, whose infamous approach on the old 16th made a tree famous. In 2006 he won by five. Then in 2012 came the Miracle at Medinah, when Europe came back from 10-6 down to win 14.5 to 13.5. All that toughening had a cost. The big wavy bunkers shrank and rounded. Greens took on pinched, alien-head shapes guarded front left and front right. Fairway bunkers drifted from the insides of doglegs to the outsides, lifted above grade with nothing tying them to the land, and tees rose into mountainous pads. The course was fighting its own ground, and it still was not holding off the best players. In the 2019 BMW Championship, Justin Thomas went 25 under with a Saturday 61. So the club turned to OCM, the team of Geoff Ogilvy, Michael Cocking and Ashley Mead. They had no real American work behind them and proposed something bold anyway. Beginning in autumn 2022, they took out hundreds of trees and let Bendelow's ridges show again. They widened fairways to 40 or 50 metres, moved bunkers back inside the corners, lowered bunker floors into the natural grade, and made the greens large again, giving the ground game and varied recovery shots room to breathe. The course reopened in July 2024. Lake Kadijah, in the middle of the property, had long asked for the same shot again and again, straight across and back. The final six holes were almost entirely redrawn around it. The par-3 13th now runs alongside the water. The short par-4 16th cuts diagonally across it. The 17th is an angled one-shotter that works along the water rather than straight over it. The 18th has gone back to its original corridor. The tree Sergio made famous came down in 2009, during earlier work, but its plaque remains, a small marker of the tighter course that came before. The course now plays 7,657 yards at par 72, and in late September 2026 the Presidents Cup will bring it before the world. Only time will tell whether a course this generous can still be the brute it once was.