Some great golf courses are handed their greatness by the land: a run of dunes, a cliff above the sea, a valley that seems to have been waiting for flags. Winged Foot West was handed very little. It sits in Mamaroneck, in Westchester County, on relatively flat, heavily wooded meadowland with rocky soil, the kind of property that is typically an unremarkable foundation for great golf. What A.W. Tillinghast made of it instead is one of the most demanding layouts in American golf, and perhaps the finest thing he ever built. The club began in 1923, when a few members of the New York Athletic Club founded something of their own and borrowed the winged foot from their emblem for its name. Tillinghast gave them two courses, West and East, and Winged Foot has since become a true American classic. The West has hosted six U.S. Opens, a PGA Championship, two U.S. Women's Opens, two U.S. Amateurs, a U.S. Senior Open and a Walker Cup. It is private, reached only by invitation, and those who manage the invitation find a serious golf course with no weak holes. The length announces itself first. Ten of the par fours stretch well beyond 400 yards, and a player should expect to use every club in the bag. The closing stretch is brutal. It begins at the 13th, a 210-yard par three, and then hands the player five par fours, every one of them over 400 yards, ending at an 18th that has a fair claim to being the finest finishing hole in the country. Earlier, the 10th stands among the best par threes anywhere in the world. But the length is not the heart of the place. The heart is the greens. Nothing about the contour or the scenery here is unusual, and it seems any good parkland site ought to be able to produce a course like this, and yet none has. It is a clay-soil counterpart to Pinehurst No. 2, the architecture from fifty yards in, greens included, nothing short of amazing even where the topography is not. Tillinghast's putting surfaces carry severe false fronts, intricate internal contours and big wings running off the back. Geoff Ogilvy, who won the U.S. Open here in 2006, called them beautiful and scary. The lesson arrives immediately. The first green is split by a trough that snakes through its center, creating several sections: the front, the trough itself, the right and the left, so that the opening approach is already a question with more than one answer. In 2016 and 2017, in readiness for the 2020 U.S. Open, Gil Hanse and his team restored the West, reclaiming the original size and shape of Tillinghast's greens with input from the late club historian Neil Regan. They rediscovered lost features along the way and expanded the greens by 26 percent, unlocking new dynamics and a broader variety of pin positions. Set the greens of 2006 beside those of 2020 and the change in size, shape and slope is striking. Then came the 2020 U.S. Open, and Bryson DeChambeau won it comfortably for his first major title. He appeared to solve the Winged Foot puzzle with force, leaning into his immense strength, driving the ball long and hacking short approaches out of the rough, using the open approaches to the greens. That leaves the course with a question as it heads toward the 2028 U.S. Open, and part of the answer may run against intuition. Historical aerials reveal that Tillinghast originally intended the West to be much wider than it is today. Restoring the fairways to that width could enhance the strategic options, and with them the hope that success at Winged Foot will rest on more than power alone, on that ordinary ground Tillinghast turned into something extraordinary.