Oak Hill Country Club (East Course)

Favorite Hole

No. 15, par 3, 160 yards

Andrew Green’s transformation this little par 3 is the highlight of his work at Oak Hill. In 1976, the club abandoned Donald Ross’s postage-stamp concept in favor of a slightly longer hole playing about 10 degrees to the right. George and Tom Fazio built the new green and installed an absurd-looking artificial pond.

Green’s effort is not a replica of the original, but it recaptures the spirit of a short, treacherous par 3. The hole plays downhill to a narrow green benched into a left-to-right slope. Although the putting surface is only 13 paces across, there are several pin positions that bring different bunkers and contours into play. Precise short irons can yield birdies, but misses to either side can easily turn into bogeys or doubles. It’s a nervy, high-variance one-shotter that will produce drama at future major championships.

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Overall Thoughts

Andrew Green is one of our most skilled restoration and renovation architects. He has a strong understanding of Golden Age design and a deep bag of tricks for manufacturing vintage-feeling shapes. I often think about the story he told me on The Fried Egg Podcast in 2021 about the process of trial and error that his team used to reproduce the ruggedness of Donald Ross’s bunker edges at Inverness Club:

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https://thefriedegg.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Andrew-Green-on-Inverness-Bunkers.mp3

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Green is also a patient and savvy diplomat. On contentious topics like tree removal and green expansion, he is remarkably persuasive. I’m not sure how many architects could have convinced powerful memberships like those at Inverness, Congressional, Scioto, and Oak Hill to make the radical changes they did. Green is an important force in modern golf architecture—someone whose ideas and methods will shape the future of the game.

His work at Oak Hill undoubtedly improved the East Course. The greens now extend to the edges of their pads, allowing for challenging pin positions near hazards and runoffs. The bunkers have angular edges that attractively break up the the course’s smooth topography. The removal of many trees—an impressive accomplishment, considering how much Oak Hill values its arboreal assets—has opened up sightlines across the property and reintroduced air and light circulation to many fairways and greens. Finally, the elimination of two out-of-place Fazio par 3s in favor of the Ross-inspired fifth and 15th holes is a vast improvement, executed with taste and attention to detail by Green’s crew.

I know you’re waiting for the “but.” Here it is: Oak Hill East, even after its recent overhaul, is not a top-tier golf course, in my opinion. Any publication that deems it one of the 40 greatest courses in the country, as Golf Magazine did last year—much less one of the 20 greatest, as Golf Digest did in 2021—is exaggerating its virtues.

This is not just a case of a restoration failing to go far enough. I suspect that the East Course was never one of Donald Ross’s finest efforts. Three of his original par 3s traveled in roughly the same direction, and Green’s fifth hole—a replacement of Ross’s sixth—retains this flaw. Two pairs of par 4s (1 and 10, 6 and 7) use the creek that winds through the site in similar ways. In general, the hole designs lack the creative inspiration of Ross’s best work. There are no uses of the land as as memorable as the sideways-tiered eighth fairway at Essex County, no greens as bold as the sixth at Oakland Hills, and no holes as strategically engaging as the reverse-camber 18th at Seminole.

To be fair, the back nine at Oak Hill East is excellent. It has a mixture of short and long holes, big and small greens, tough and gettable holes. I love the 12th, a par 4 that calls for a short-iron into an elevated green carved gracefully into a knoll. It’s the most unconventional green site on the East Course, and the only one that runs on a diagonal to the line of play. It gives you a shot of excitement, while also reminding you that the rest of the course isn’t quite as stimulating.

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Some of Oak Hill’s tameness comes from presentation—a set of choices about preservation and maintenance that the club has made for decades and has continued to make after Green’s renovation. It’s striking, for instance, that even as Green’s team meticulously re-created Ross’s greens and bunkers, they did not, or weren’t asked to, reestablish the width of his playing corridors. The original fairways were, in many cases, 50 to 60 yards wide. Today, they average 25 to 30 yards across, and a number of trees sit close to the edges. In this important sense, Ross’s East Course has not been restored.

The effects of this decision are most noticeable on No. 7, a burly par 4 of 460 yards. Ross’s hole had a capacious fairway bisected diagonally by a creek from short right to long left. The more you laid back, the roomier your landing zone was; the more you pushed up, the bigger the threat of the creek became. You could choose to play it safe and deal with a long approach or risk a penalty for a better chance at hitting your second shot close.

Today’s hole is very different. The fairway is half as wide as it used to be and offers two options: play near the creek on the right or bend your drive around a grove of trees on the left. Only the biggest hitters can take advantage of the second option, and it’s a relatively safe play that steers clear of the water. Shorter players are stuck with the first option. They will also find that the closer they play to the creek, the more they’ll be blocked out by a large oak 75 yards short right of the green. It’s the inverse of risk-reward, a strategic muddle. The culprits are mowing lines and tree positions that fail to take the hole’s design into account.

Another aspect of the East Course’s presentation that I find unfortunate is the all-green-everywhere maintenance. Since the areas between holes are covered in lush rough, the player never really gets a sense of the site’s natural character. This is a subjective matter—presumably, there are those who like how neat, non-natural rough looks; otherwise, why would it be so common at high-end country clubs?—but one I feel strongly about. Uniform green domesticates the game and saps its adventurous spirit.

Now that I’ve said all of this, would it be strange to add that I’d be happy to see Oak Hill get more major championships? Rochester is a wonderful golf town—the birthplace of Walter Hagen and the childhood home of Robert Trent Jones. The East Course is brawny enough for the pros and spacious enough for PGA and USGA buildouts. And hell, it’s better than Bellerive.

But it’s also probably not the best Donald Ross course in its own city.

0 Eggs

Shortcomings in presentation get in the way of the player’s ability to appreciate Oak Hill East’s design and land. But truth be told, the design is far from Donald Ross’s most brilliant, and the land is handsome but not remarkable. We can’t find an Egg here.

Course Tour

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