Home of the 2026 Presidents Cup: Medinah Country Club No. 3
Twenty-five miles west of downtown Chicago, behind a clubhouse that looks like it was airlifted in from another continent, sits one of the most decorated pieces of golf ground in America. Medinah Country Club's Course No. 3 has hosted three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup that people still can't quite believe happened. This week it adds the Presidents Cup to the list, and it does so as a very different golf course than the one most fans remember.
Fast Facts
Year Opened: 1928 (club founded 1924)
Accessibility: Private
Architect: Tom Bendelow (redesigns by Harry Collis, Roger Packard, Rees Jones and OCM)
Par: 72
Yardage: 7,564
Championships Hosted: U.S. Open (1949, 1975, 1990), PGA Championship (1999, 2006), Ryder Cup (2012), Presidents Cup (2026)
A Shriners' Retreat
In 1924, a group of Shriners from Chicago's Medinah Temple bought more than 600 acres of DuPage County farmland and built a full country retreat: 54 holes of golf, a gun club, a ski jump and a toboggan slide, all wrapped around a man-made lake named Lake Kadijah. The clubhouse, dedicated in 1926, mixes Byzantine, Moorish and Italian influences under a dome and minarets, and nearly a century later it remains one of the most photographed buildings in golf.
The Course That Wasn't Supposed to Be the Star
Tom Bendelow laid out all three original courses, and No. 3 was intended as the ladies' course. That idea lasted about two years. When "Lighthorse" Harry Cooper shot 63 in the 1930 Medinah Open, the club set about making No. 3 harder, and it has been made harder and longer ever since, most notably by Rees Jones in 2002, whose renovation stretched it to 7,561 yards, the longest course in major championship history at the time. Through all of it, the identity held: a long, tree-lined parkland test where the fairways felt like hallways and two par 3s across Lake Kadijah decided championships.
A New Medinah
After 2019, the club concluded that narrow corridors and length no longer challenged the best players in the world. Rather than add another 200 yards, it hired OCM, the Australian firm of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead, and gave them license to rethink the whole thing. No. 3 closed in October 2022 and reopened in 2024. Hundreds of trees came out, fairways were widened, greens were enlarged and given real contour, and the bunker count grew from about 70 to about 100, now ragged and irregular in the style of Bendelow's 1920s course.
The last six holes were rerouted. The 16th, formerly a par 3 over the water, is now a short cape-style par 4 across the lake, the 17th is a new par 3 crossing it the other direction, and the 18th has moved back beside the 1st. The result draws on the Melbourne Sandbelt courses Ogilvy grew up on: wide, firm and fast, with angles that change with the wind and hole locations.
Up Next: The Presidents Cup
The 16th Presidents Cup runs September 24 to 27, the first time the matches have come to the Chicago area. Brandt Snedeker captains the U.S. team. Geoff Ogilvy captains the Internationals, which means the man who redesigned Medinah No. 3 will spend the week trying to beat the Americans on it. The U.S. has won the last ten in a row, but Medinah has a habit of hosting the weeks nobody sees coming.
Medinah Country Club is available now in GOLF+, so you can get a look at the new No. 3 before the teams tee it up. Same holes, same lake, same clubhouse in the background.