Crooked Stick Golf Club - Indiana, U.S.A.

Crooked Stick Golf Club, located outside Indianapolis, was the first course to reflect the emerging style of Pete Dye, who would go on to revolutionize golf course architecture and create the courses that defined target-style golf in the 1980s. Dye, who had been a successful insurance salesman in Indiana, designed Crooked Stick in 1964, shortly after he returned from a tour of the great courses of Scotland with his wife Alice that would have a profound effect on his approach to design. Laid out on a flat cornfield, Crooked Stick features the waste bunkers, sculpted hazards, and imaginative shaping that were to become Dye's hallmark and it remains one of his best courses. Dye returned to Crooked Stick to lengthen the course prior to the 1991 PGA Championship, when the prodigiously long-hitting John Daly burst onto the scene to win the title and begin his tempestuous legend. Dye named the course for a stick found in the cornfield, based on the belief that the game began when a boy tending his flock used his shepherd's crook to hit a rock in the field.

Muir Field Village Golf Club - Ohio, U.S.A.

Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, just north of Columbus, had its genesis in a conversation that Jack Nicklaus had with his old friend, Ivor Young, while they were sitting on the clubhouse veranda at Augusta National during the 1966 Masters. Nicklaus suggested that it would be wonderful to have a course in his hometown of Columbus that would convey the same type of golfing ambience as Augusta. Young was in the real estate business and when he returned to Columbus he found 10 or 11 potential sites for a course. Nicklaus and he ended up buying the first one they had visited-a 160-acre parcel that Jack used to hunt on when he was growing up. Construction began in 1972, Nicklaus working with his design partner at the time, the late Desmond Muirhead. Muirfield Village, named for the course in Scotland where Nicklaus won the 1966 British Open, is an impeccably manicured tableau of pasture and woodlands, with three intersecting streams on the property trilling through the fairways and coming into play on 11 of the holes. Nicklaus fulfilled his dream of building a great course specifically designed for tournament golf, as Muirfield Village hosts the annual Memorial Tournament, dedicated each year to an individual honoree.