Stonewall Golf Club - Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

The aptly named Stonewall Golf Club is in the town of Elverson in rural Lancaster County, an hour's drive west of Philadelphia. The impetus for building the course, completed in 1992,came from A. John May, the managing partner of a prominent Philadelphia law firm. The founders originally hired Tom Fazio to design the course, but he was unable to take the project beyond the initial stages because of other commitments. The club then turned to young architect Tom Doak, who has since made a big splash in the design world, but was relatively unknown at the time. Collaborating with Gil Hanse, Doak found Stonewall, with its mix of rolling pasture, woodlands, and pockets of wetlands on what once had been a dairy farm, to be an ideal site for his naturalistic, Scottish-influenced style of design. The layout features chipping areas around the greens and tall fescue grasses flanking the fairways. There are indeed half a dozen old stone walls on the property, while the 18th fairway sweeps down to the sunken green in front of an old stone dairy building that now serves as the clubhouse. In 2003, Doak completed a second 18-hole course at Stonewall.

Oakmont Country Club - Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Oakmont is the singular vision of its founder, Henry Clay Fownes, the Pittsburgh industrialist, and his son William C. Fownes, Jr. (who was given the 'Jr." despite being named after his uncle). Located a dozen miles north of Pittsburgh, the course was planned by Fownes pere and built by 150 men and 25 mule teams, beginning September 15,1903, and opening a year later. The Fownes took a strict Calvinist view of golf as a game that was meant to be difficult and Oakmont reflects the credo of William Fownes that "a shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost." Oakmont's penal bunkers are legendary, particularly the eight rows of the "Church Pews" that separate the third and fourth fairways. The clay soil did not allow for building deep bunkers, so Oakmont's were filled with heavy river sand and then, starting in 1920, furrowed with specially built heavy metal rakes with two-inch-long teeth. The Fownes had the greens rolled with a 1,500-pound roller that required eight men to pull. The Oakmont rakes are gone nowadays, but Oakmont's greens remain the fastest and wickedest in all of golf, where four-putts are not out of the ordinary and putts have been known to fall backwards into the cup. Oakmont has figured prominently on the stage of championship golf, with Ben Hogan winning the U.S. Open there during his epic season of 1953. In 1973, Johnny Miller fired a blistering 63, which remains the lowest final round in the history of the championship, to win the Open. In 1994, Ernie Els took the title by outlasting Colin Montgomerie and Loren Roberts in an 18-hole playoff that ended in sudden-death.