Background on Medinah Country Club

Don’t come up short: The stunning 245-yard par-3 13th on the No.3 Course at Medinah Country Club

How Scottish golfers helped shape the history of this American venue

Paul Lawrie might be the only Scot taking part in this year’s Ryder Cup but it could well be another Aberdonian, born 101 years before the 1999 Open champion, who will wield the biggest influence in the 39th edition of the match.

That man is Tom Bendelow. Born in the Granite City in 1868, he was a prolific golf course designer, mapping out some 600-plus layouts in a career spanning more than 35 years. One of those was the No.3 Course at Medinah, where this year’s Ryder Cup action will unfold. And though the course has changed considerably since Bendelow first conceived it back in the ‘Roaring Twenties’, much of the character and personality that the great man poured into it remains to this day. Bendelow was one of nine children born to the owners of a popular pie shop in Aberdeen. Introduced to golf by his father, he trained as a typesetter before marrying the daughter of a local farmer and emigrating to the United States in 1892.

It was there that his career in golf took off. Whilst working at the New York Herald, he taught golf in his spare time. Among his clients was the Pratt family in Long Island, who had found their fortune as the owners of Standard Oil. As well as getting him to teach them to play, they also commissioned Bendelow to lay out a private six-hole course on their estate.

That caught the attention of AG Spalding, the sporting goods manufacturer, who hired him to exclusively promote golf in the New York and New Jersey areas.

In 1901, Bendelow moved to Chicago to become Spalding’s director of golf course development. The game was booming across the US and Spalding wanted Bendelow to help its prosperity. He spent the next 16 years traveling all over North America, designing courses, offering advice and consultation to developers and trying to actively engage players’ associations.

By the time he died in 1936, aged just 67, he had already established himself as the most productive designer of his generation – indeed, perhaps any generation.

Amongst his most notable courses are East Lake at Atlantic Athletic Club, where the great Bobby Jones learned his trade, as well as Mission Hills in Kansas (not to be confused with the huge development of the same name in China).

However, perhaps his most high-profile work was carried out at Medinah Country Club in his adopted home state, Illinois. Founded in 1924 by the Medinah Shriners, the club was intended to become the finest country club in America. In order to fulfil that goal, it had to have at least one golf course. Bendelow was commissioned to give them three. The first of these opened in 1925, the second a year later, with the third and most famous of them all opening in 1928 – with the intention of being used solely by the club’s lady members.

As it turned out, the course was too easy for them and so it was toughened up and lengthened considerably before, in 1949, it held its first major, the US Open, won by Cary Middlecoff. It was used for the same championship in 1975 and, again, in 1990 before its profile exploded on the global scene when Tiger Woods won the PGA Championship there in 1999. The then world No.1 repeated the trick in 2006 when the course again staged the year’s final major.

This year, the track will host the Ryder Cup – the first time in the event’s history it has taken place in Illinois – and purists will be glad to know its design ticks so many of the boxes that are required of a good Ryder Cup stage: vicious doglegs, card-wrecking par-3s, long carries over water and treacherous greens.

The layout Lawrie and Co will tackle might be significantly different to how Bendelow originally intended it – an estimated $3million has been spent readying it for this year’s contest – but there is no question that the great man’s influence echoes loud and clear around the fairways of this magnificent piece of land.