Shinnecock Hills Golf Club - New York, U.S.A.

Shinnecock Hills Golf Club owes its founding to a visit to the Biarritz golf course in southwest France by William Vanderbilt and his party in the winter of 1890-91. Vanderbilt witnessed an exhibition by the Scottish pro Young Willie Dunn at the famous "Chasm Hole" and decided then and there that the game should be introduced in the United States. Shortly thereafter, Vanderbilt and his friends enlisted the aid of Samuel Parrish, another member of their wealthy Southampton circle and the founder of the Parrish Art Museum. That summer, Parrish brought another Scottish pro, Willie Davis of Royal Montreal, to design a 12-hole course through the sandhills and underbrush overlooking Shinnecock Bay, using a crew of 150 Shinnecock Indians from the nearby reservation. The original course underwent a couple of redesigns, the second by C.B. Macdonald, who did the neighboring National Golf Links, but an almost entirely new course was created in 1931 by William Flynn and Howard Toomey (with a young Dick Wilson as construction engineer) after a highway was routed through the old course. The course has a striking links look, with its soaring and swooping ribbons of fairway spread out through the windblown sierras of wild fescue grasses. Shinnecock hosted the second U.S. Open in 1896 and the event did not return again for 90 years. The 1986 Open at Shinnecock was an immense success, with Ray Floyd the winner, and the Open returned again in 1995 and most recently in 2004, when Retief Goosen was the victor. The understated and symmetrical shingled clubhouse, designed by the legendary Stanford White, was completed in 1892. The first clubhouse in America, it is a landmark in its own right.

Golf Links of America - New York, U.S.A.

The National Golf Links of America, located in Southampton, was the first great American golf course and the enduring masterpiece of Charles Blair Macdonald, the patriarch of golf in the United States. A native of Chicago, Macdonald attended St. Andrews University in Scotland as a teenager in the 1870s and fell passionately in love with the game. Macdonald, who is credited with inventing the term "golf course architect," was determined to build a course in the United States that would be the equal of the great courses of Scotland. He combed the Eastern seaboard in search of ideal terrain, and found it on Long Island in the 200 acres of sandy scrub knitted with bayberry and blackberry bushes adjoining Shinnecock Hills and overlooking Peconic Bay. Macdonald studied first­hand and also obtained detailed maps of famous holes in Scotland, after which he modeled several holes at the National. He also created originals that showed great ingenuity. Macdonald and his protégé, local engineer Seth Raynor, went on to design many superb courses, but the National, opened in 1909, remained his most treasured creation and he continued to dominate the club and refine his design through the rest of his life. The National is a very private club and has hosted only one prominent event in its history, the first Walker Cup competition in 1922.