Beverly is a golf course that refuses to be quiet. It sits inside the city limits of Chicago, and it carries the city with it on every swing. A train line runs along the western edge of the property. Planes pass overhead on their way into Midway. And through the middle of it all runs 87th Street, busy and indifferent, splitting the course into two rectangles of land. The front nine lies to the north of the road, the back nine on the other side. You play the first half of your round on one side of the traffic and finish it on the other, crossing over as if passing from one chapter to the next. What lives beneath all that noise is one of the finest courses in a city crowded with great old ones. The club was formed in 1908, and the first layout was the work of Tom Bendelow and George O'Neil, the club's first professional. Ten years later Donald Ross came and redesigned it, and his name has hung over the place ever since. Beverly's own story is more tangled and more interesting than that. O'Neil was a little-known man who designed a handful of courses across the Midwest and Florida, and his routing, the bones of the thing, remains largely intact. Ross redesigned it, deftly, and made the most of the land he was given. But the walk you take at Beverly owes a great deal to a club professional whose name few remember. The city has pressed on the course over the years, and the course has given ground. The ninth green once sat on the far side of 87th Street, before the road grew into the thoroughfare it is now. As the street expanded, the green was moved to where it sits today, and the hole changed drastically. The opening tee shot used to fly over the road too, until the tee was moved up. These are the scars of a golf course living inside a working city, and they make Beverly feel less like a museum piece than a place that has had to negotiate for its existence. In 2002 Ron Prichard led a substantial renovation that took out trees, refurbished the bunkers and enlarged the putting surfaces, a careful effort to restore a Ross classic. The reward came in 2009, when the USGA brought its senior amateur championship here. That was hardly the first time champions walked these fairways. In 1931 Francis Ouimet, then 38, won the US Amateur at Beverly, eighteen years after his famous victory at Brookline. He arrived as a question mark, short on recent tournament play, and left with the trophy. It was a second underdog story from a man already famous for one. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer captured the Western Open here, in 1963 and 1967. Beverly also hosted the Chicago Open, a tournament of yesteryear whose list of champions runs through Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead and Ken Venturi. In the second-to-last staging of that event, Luke Donald, still an amateur, won here by six shots. Perhaps the truest thing about Beverly, though, is who carries the bags. The club boasts the single largest Evans Scholar caddie program in the country. Over the past decade the course has cultivated an identity as a pure golf club in a crowded regional landscape, and that program may be the purest part of it. So you stand on a tee with a train rattling past and a jet passing low over your head, and you hit anyway. The noise never wins. It just reminds you where you are, and how lucky it is that this ground is still here.