ROAD TO THE MAJORS
By Phil Carlucci
Behind the green of the par-3 11th at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club last September, Scott Langley put on a short-game clinic. The four-time U.S. Open competitor and the low amateur at Pebble Beach in 2010 threw high lobs over the hillsides, hoping to spin and stick them near the flag. Then he skipped low pitches up the rising banks. Putt it, chip it, bump it with a 3-wood – Shinnecock offers plenty of solutions to precarious situations, he told a group of assembled golf media, but few are particularly effective once you’re stuck in its sandy grip.
“Options give the guys a lot of trouble around a place like this,” said Langley, senior director of player relations for the USGA. “Options and uncertainty.”
Ninety-five years ago, when William Flynn redeveloped Shinnecock Hills, he chose to perch No. 11 on top of an angled ridge. Today it covers a mere 155 yards, but the world’s best players are on defense from the first practice swing. Misses either splash in bunkers or speed downhill to the collection area where Langley staged his demo. Diminutive but devilish. Options and uncertainty. Most of Langley’s shots ran off the surface toward the sand.
The USGA will put on its marquee event next month in Southampton, N.Y., with plans to formally introduce the golf world to Shinnecock Hills. Not Shinnecock Hills as presented by the USGA. Shinnecock Hills, 1931 vintage, by a figure whose lone Long Island design is one of the finest golf courses on the planet.
“This is the first time a true Flynn presentation of the golf course will take place,” says Jeff Hall, USGA managing director of Rules and Open championships. “We’re very excited about that.”
Golf course superintendent Jon Jennings says this year’s tournament will be about celebrating the “best playing challenge in the world” rather than pressing the USGA stamp onto an American classic. “There are no changes to the course whatsoever,” he says. “It will play true to its design.”
The comments distill down to what has become the USGA’s core tenet for its approach to the 2026 national championship: “Let Shinnecock be Shinnecock.”
In that simple four-word statement is an admission that there has yet to be a genuine embrace of Flynn’s wide, strategic fairways, expansive greens and pitched runoff areas, all fortified by the East End’s unrelenting winds. Even as the messaging centered around return-to-Flynn principles heading into the 2018 Open, the USGA rolled up stretches of newly widened fairways and re-narrowed them with sodded rough.
And in 2004, many restored features were simply dulled by slim fairways, brutally thick rough and parched conditions. Earlier Opens – note all the trees and high greenside rough amid Corey Pavin’s famed approach – barely resemble the open expanse the club revived in the years since.
“We don’t run away from the past,” says Brent Paladino, senior director of championship administration for the USGA. “We understand what happened in 2004 and 2018, and we’re committed in 2026 to make the course shine in the most positive light possible.”
Wayne Morrison consulted on the Flynn-focused restoration plan conceived by longtime green chair Charles Stevenson more than 25 years ago. Author of “The Nature Faker,” a 2,600-page colossus on Flynn’s design career, Morrison contends Flynn was as qualified as any architect to challenge players a century into the future.
“He was all about shot testing,” Morrison says. “There are different ways to play the holes at Shinnecock, but if you can hit the specific shot being tested, you’re greatly rewarded.”
Flynn cleverly arranged Shinnecock’s holes in a series of triangles, sending players out into an exhausting 18-hole tango with and against the prevailing winds. The course is always turning, and players are left uncomfortable and uncertain, physically and mentally spent by the end of a round. He also had the foresight to build elasticity into his courses. That’s what allowed the USGA to add nearly 500 yards to the course for the 2018 Open without papering over any of Shinnecock’s nuances.
Morrison says Flynn understood how technology would impact the sport and was an early proponent of designating specific courses for U.S. Open play. “He said if they don’t do something about the ball we’re going to have to start designing 7,500- or 8,000-yard golf courses,” Morrison says, “and that was in 1927.” This year’s official yardage is 7,434.
The tee shot at the split-fairway, par-5 fifth starts one triangle of holes, followed by the long, par-4 sixth, where a decision must be made about carrying sandy scrub to a blind landing area. Shinnecock’s famous redan awaits at No. 7. The three holes pivot and face distinctly different wind patterns.
Hall touts No. 8 as a prime example of Flynn’s “strategic width.” Narrowed fairways once took the cluster of left-side bunkers out of play, but now players need to fly those traps for any chance to attack the green. “The carry is increasingly longer the farther left you go,” Hall says.
The par-3 11th forms part of another triangle that begins at No. 10, a 415-yard par 4 confronting players with more options – send a drive to the bottom of a valley or club down to stay level with the plateau green. A false front can send balls 40 yards back down the fairway and a runoff area in the back sweeps deep misses far from the pin. Recovery shots from the back side risk running clear off the green into the fairway.
In the late 1920s, a planned extension of Route 27 through Southampton prompted Shinnecock Hills president Lucien Tyng to purchase three parcels north and east of the club’s existing C.B. Macdonald course. Going back to the club’s 1891 roots, the Willie Davis, Willie Dunn and Macdonald iterations all stretched farther south, at times even playing over and around the Long Island Rail Road line that still remains. A road extension required a course overhaul.
The club brought in Flynn, one of several prominent designers turning out highly regarded golf courses in the Philadelphia area, whose work included design and construction work alongside Hugh Wilson at Merion. He was a hands-on architect in full control of all aspects of his builds. When Dick Wilson freestyled the construction of some of Shinnecock’s greens while the designer was off site, Morrison says, Flynn returned and had to be talked out of firing Wilson on the spot.
Before the course was built, Shinnecock called on another esteemed architect, Charles Alison, to review Flynn’s drawings. “We are entirely satisfied that Mr. Flynn’s plans are as good as can be made on this site and that the proposed course will prove to be of the first order,” Alison wrote in his report.
“It’s a 1 though 18 perfect routing,” says The Fried Egg’s Brendan Porath. “The green sites, the mix of left and right, different shot shapes. The routing is the best attribute.”
The course came through Long Island’s unusually harsh 2025–26 winter in fantastic shape according to Jennings, now in his 15th season at Shinnecock and second one preparing for a U.S. Open as superintendent. “I’ve never seen it look this good in the spring,” he says. “All the snow we had was like Saran wrap. It sealed in the freshness.”
For the best view of Shinnecock in all its grandeur, Hall would head right over to that dicey little par-3 to watch Flynn bewilder today’s elite players. “If I was a fan I’d post up on No. 11 and take it all in from there. You feel the history when you’re out there. It’s so special.”
Golf course photos courtesy of USGA/Fred Vuich.
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