126th U.S. Open

The third major of the year arrives at a course that’s been called the greatest test of golf in the world. The U.S. Open returns to Shinny this week, a course that sits on nearly every short list of the best in America and is set to host again in 2036, when it will stage the U.S. Open and the U.S. Women’s Open in consecutive weeks — a first for the club. Shinnecock gives up nothing easily and has produced some of the most memorable finishes in major history. From the clubhouse on its hill, the open, rolling terrain falls away toward the Peconic Bay, the primary wind engine of the property. It’s as handsome a setting as golf offers, and as exacting.

There have been four U.S. Opens here in the last hundred years. Of the 623 players in the collective field, only three have broken par for the week. Goosen and Mickelson in 2004, Floyd in 1986. Wild.

U.S. Open setups are notoriously diabolical — the USGA builds the year’s hardest test on purpose, and most years the field spends four days hanging on. Shinnecock is an even more extreme version of that idea, a course that does the punishing on its own before the USGA adds a thing.

J.J. Spaun arrives as defending champion, a year removed from the closing birdie that won him Oakmont. A test like this tends to identify a particular kind of player. Birdies are scarce and bogeys come in bunches, so the winner is rarely the hottest hand of the moment. It is the one with the most complete game and the temperament to absorb four days of grinding without letting one bad hour become a bad round. Patience is a skill here, and it is tested as hard as any swing.

Scheffler arrives chasing the career Grand Slam, the favorite by a wide margin, on a course he had never set foot on until a scouting trip this month — where what surprised him was not the width of the fairways but the difficulty of the greens.

Streaming: Peacock carries every TV hour plus featured-group and featured-hole coverage all day. Sunday’s final hour on NBC is the commercial-free Rolex Hour.

America’s course

You could argue Shinnecock is the St. Andrews of American golf. One of five founding clubs of the USGA, incorporated before any other this side of the pond in 1891. Willie Davis laid twelve holes across a sand ridge between the bay and the ocean, with a crew drawn from the neighboring Shinnecock reservation. The shingled clubhouse on the hill, built in 1892 to a Stanford White design, is generally called the first building in America put up expressly for golfers — low and weathered, and once visible to every passenger on the Long Island Rail Road.

Few courses have had more authors. Davis laid the first holes; Willie Dunn extended them; C.B. Macdonald — a member — and Seth Raynor rebuilt the course after World War I with their template holes. Then the state drew a highway through the southern holes, and the club bought higher, more broken land to the north and handed it to William Flynn. His 1931 routing is the course played this week. It kept Macdonald and Raynor’s ground on only a handful of holes — the 3rd, 7th, and 9th most recognizably.

Flynn was the one member of the Philadelphia School of architects not born in Pennsylvania, and the one who called himself the Nature Faker, for shaping features so they looked as though the land had done them on its own. He preferred to let a site’s movement and the prevailing wind supply the difficulty rather than add much of his own. Of all his work, Shinnecock is the course most often called his best.

In 2012 the club brought in Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who worked from old aerials to take the course back toward Flynn. They cleared the trees that had grown in over the mid-century, widened the fairways, pushed the greens out to their original edges to recover lost hole locations, and brought back the fescue. The USGA narrowed the fairways again with transplanted sod before 2018, a crew of seventy-five stripping nearly five acres of turf in a single week, but what lay underneath was Flynn’s. This June the course arrives with nothing further done to it.

Wide open, but unforgiving

The wind is the story at Shinnecock, and it is no joke. The property sits exposed on the South Fork between water on two sides — Peconic Bay to the north, the Atlantic to the south — with the trees gone and almost nothing left to slow the gusts down.

Flynn’s routing turns with nearly every hole, and the wind turns with it: off the bay and the ocean it rarely meets two shots from the same quarter, which leaves a player little chance to commit to a yardage and trust it. If you’ve played golf in 20–25+ mph gusts, you know how remarkably difficult distance judgments can be.

Routing map — Fried Egg Golf

How much the direction matters showed up in practice this week. The wind came out of the north, a direction so unusual here that members are said to avoid the course when it blows that way, and several players skipped Monday rather than gather misleading yardages — Rahm, Thomas, and Spieth among those who arrived days early to see it in a representative wind instead. The fairways are wide because if they weren’t, scores in the 80s would not be uncommon.

There is length here too, 7,434 yards at par 70, up almost 500 yards from the 2004 setup. Still, the players who have done well at Shinnecock have tended to talk about control rather than power. The club in your hand is only as good as the wind that carries it.

The greens are crowned and run firm on fescue, and they hold very little that lands on the wrong side of a ridge. The trees are now lumber and the fairways are wide — the widest in U.S. Open history, averaging 48 yards across — but width has not made the course especially kind. A drive can find short grass and still leave a lousy angle into the green — the delayed penalty Andy Johnson has written about, where the trouble shows up not where the ball lands but on the line it leaves for the next one.

Green firmness is at the forefront of discussion heading into Thursday. Rain and a cautious USGA hand left them softer in early practice than the firm, fast surfaces of 2018, and the setup team has signaled a gradual approach — targeting 11.5 to 12 feet on the Stimpmeter, a far cry from the 15.5 they ran at Oakmont a year ago — letting the course bare its teeth toward the weekend rather than right off the bat on Thursday. Matt Fitzpatrick chimed in on the moisture levels Monday, against the grain of historical qualms.

The archetype that tends to go the distance here is the one that can flight the ball low in wind, control distance into firm greens, and take the occasional bogey without much fuss. Those who treat the width as license to bomb, and aim to overpower the place, more often find by the weekend that the wrong half of a wide fairway leaves them little better off than the rough.

The shot data from 2018 points to the same thing. Every step toward the hole presented a greater challenge. By DataGolf’s accounting it was the second-toughest course in their database on approaches from inside 150 yards, and the toughest anywhere on shots played from around the green. The wedge into a firm target, and the up-and-down when it misses, are where the week is expected to be decided.

A few good ones

Where the championship gets decided. Yardages from the 2026 scorecard.

Hole 7 — Par 3, 187 yards “Redan”

The hole the 2004 Open came undone on, and usually the first one the cameras find. It is a Redan — a green tilted down and away from front-right to back-left, with a deep bunker guarding the short side — built by Macdonald and Raynor and kept by Flynn, who raised the green a few feet. The catch that sets it apart from a textbook Redan is that the bank in front will not feed a running shot up to the surface; the ball has to be flown to a firm front edge and trusted to stay. Architecture writers argue about whether it qualifies as a true Redan at all. At modern green speeds only a couple of hole locations, middle-left, still hold a ball at all. Where the USGA cuts this flag, and how hard the wind crosses it, is usually a fair sign of how close to the edge the setup is running.

Hole 9 — Par 4, 482 yards “Ben Nevis”

Named for the highest peak in Britain, which says something about the second shot. A blind drive over rolling, glacial ground where a flat lie is close to luck, then a long, climbing approach to a tilted green set just below the clubhouse veranda, played uphill with the patio looking on. Opinion on the hole splits — the hanging lies and the sudden climb strike some as awkward — though the right half of the green feeds toward the flag, the one invitation it offers. Short is common and costly; above the hole is little better. Worth watching how many of the best players in the world take their bogey here and move on.

Hole 11 — Par 3, 157 yards “Hill Head”

The shortest hole on the card, and to many eyes one of the best short par 3s anywhere — a small green perched on a dune that falls away into bunkers on nearly every side. Ben Crenshaw is said to have called it the shortest par 5 in America. Fried Egg Golf places it in the company of Augusta’s 12th, the 17th at Sawgrass, and the Postage Stamp at Royal Troon — a tiny hole that sits in a player’s head from the first tee. In a stiff wind a wedge from inside 160 yards becomes an awkward shot, and a miss leaves the kind of recovery a four or a five can come from.

Hole 16 — Par 5, 614 yards “Shinnecock”

The only par 5 on the back nine and the last real birdie on the card — a long, bending hole ringed by bunkers, and the high point of a back nine many rate among the best in golf. Reaching it in two means threading a narrow opening most players won’t risk; the field will mostly lay back and wedge in. It’s the hole where a player who needs a shot on Sunday has to decide how much to spend getting one.

Hole 18 — Par 4, 490 yards “Home”

Uphill to the clubhouse, into the prevailing wind, the drive favoring a right side most players cannot see from the tee. This is where Corey Pavin hit a 228-yard 4-wood to five feet to win the 1995 Open by two over Greg Norman, still the shot the members talk about. The drive gets the attention, but the green is where the hole bites — tilted and ringed by falloffs, it gives back nothing but a precise approach. A hard par to close with, and a harder place to need a birdie.

The model’s two cents

Course Fit is scored 0–100 (field rank in parentheses). Major Bump is the player’s historical strokes-gained-per-round over or under his baseline at majors, applied on top of the base Par+ score.

A few names worth singling out:

• Scheffler is, no surprise, again the clear top pick. He leads the field in course fit with a world-class approach game, avoids bogeys the best on Tour, and carries a positive major record. There is no soft spot in his profile this week.
• Fitzpatrick at #4 fits the moment as well as anyone — third in course fit, in strong recent form, and a U.S. Open champion who said out loud this week that he wants Shinnecock as dry and firm as it can get. He is a quality wind player with the kind of dogged, grind-it-out temperament the championship rewards. The lone knock is a slightly negative major record (−0.18 strokes from that adjustment), the same flag the model puts on a few of these names.
• Rahm ranks second in the model at a market price that looks low by comparison — signaling some meat on the bone. The one caveat is a thinner recent record: as a LIV player, less of his current form feeds the model, so the ranking leans more on his established baseline.
• Si Woo Kim carries the highest major adjustment in the top ten — he has consistently raised his game at the biggest events — and pairs it with strong course fit at the lowest market price in the group. A quiet value play.
• McIlroy sits third overall, but his course fit is the weakest of anyone near the top (19th in the field). The model likes the player more than it likes the match between his game and this course, which is worth keeping in mind at his price.
• Henley ranked #12 was a name that surprised me when I ran the model. He fits Shinnecock about as well as anyone in the field (sixth in course fit) and arrives in strong form coming off a win at the Charles Schwab Challenge. He also leads the Tour in driving accuracy, which matters at a course where the fairways are the widest in U.S. Open memory but the miss is still severe. The knock is a questionable major history, dropping −0.18 strokes from that adjustment.

A few journeymen and a young buck

2004 and 2018: the same course, two verdicts

The most useful guide to how Shinnecock plays is its own recent history: two Opens, fourteen years apart, that went very differently. In 2004 the setup got away from the USGA. The greens were rolled and held off water into a dry wind, and by Sunday the 7th had to be hand-watered between every group to keep balls on the surface. The final-round scoring average reached 78.7, and nobody broke par. Only Retief Goosen, who needed just 24 putts on Sunday, and Phil Mickelson finished the week under par. Tiger Woods, who admired the course, said afterward that the USGA had lost control of it.

It nearly happened again. In 2018 the Saturday hole locations on the back nine got away in a wind close to twice what was forecast, and the USGA softened the setup overnight. The restored course underneath — wide, firm, the angles back in play — held up well. Brooks Koepka won at one over to go back-to-back; Tommy Fleetwood shot 63 on Sunday and missed a record 62 by a putt on the last. Graeme McDowell, who had played the 2004 version, called the 2018 course a pure U.S. Open. The holes had not changed in between.

U.S. Opens at Shinnecock Hills

What Shinnecock argues about trees

One thing everyone notices about Shinnecock is how much of it you can see. From the high ground around the clubhouse the property opens out — fairways bending away, fescue running, holes in the distance that a tree-lined course would keep hidden until you reached them. There is very little out there to break the eye, or the wind.

The openness can look like generosity, though it does not really play that way. On a tree-lined hole the design narrows the choice for you and punishes the miss; clear the trees and the choice opens up, and a wider choice tends to be the harder problem, since what is left to defend the hole is the wind and a green that gives back little from the wrong angle. The point of the work here — Coore and Crenshaw taking out what had grown in, widening the corridors Flynn intended — was not to make Shinnecock gentler. The two Opens since seem to bear that out: the course in 2018 was wider and more open than in 2004, and it played harder.

What the restoration changed

Restoring a classic to its original drawings has become the default move in championship golf — barely a major goes by now without one. We saw exactly this at Aronimink for the PGA Championship. The temptation is to make a rule of it, take the trees down everywhere, and the rule does not travel well. Shinnecock can afford to lose its trees because the land underneath is already doing the work: the sand, the contours, the wind, the water a mile off on either side. A plainer, flatter site has none of that, and clearing it only leaves a field. The smaller argument is the better one. Trees are often a stand-in for a site that lacks movement of its own; where the ground already moves, they tend to get in the way of it.

There is a cost to all the visibility, and the players feel it more than the gallery. The same work that opened the greens also widened the shaved ground around them, so a slightly missed approach can run twenty or thirty yards from the target rather than settle in rough; Bradley Klein has made the point that the openness cuts both ways, adding strategy and severity together. It is the other half of what the clubhouse hill shows you — a course with very little cover on it, for the player or against him.

Each week, a bird native to the tournament’s corner of the country.

American Oystercatcher  ·  Haematopus palliatus

The tidal flats and shell beaches that edge this corner of the South Fork are American Oystercatcher country. It is a crow-sized shorebird, hard to miss once you know the bill — long, blunt, with some red-orange flare. Oysters and mussels don’t stand a chance against these bad boys. They feed in the shallows in loud pairs and return to the same stretch of shoreline year after year. If you’re on the grounds, keep an eye out.

Where  Beaches and marsh along the South Fork, spring through early fall Tell  That bill, and a loud piping call you’ll hear before you see it