Shinnecock Hills

Lore & Background

Shinnecock Hills Golf Club was established in 1891 by a group of wealthy New Yorkers led by William K. Vanderbilt, Edward Meade, and Duncan Cryder. Willie Davis designed the original 12-hole layout in 1891, aided by over 100 members of the local Shinnecock Indian Nation. In 1894, Scottish professional Willie Dunn Jr. expanded the course to 18 holes. The club hosted the second U.S. Open in 1896, notable for including John Shippen (the first African-American golf professional) and Oscar Bunn (a Shinnecock Indian). Shinnecock also hosted the 1900 U.S. Women’s Amateur. The course was redesigned by Charles B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor in 1901, and then completely rerouted by William S. Flynn in 1931, whose design is effectively the same layout played today. In the 2010s, an extensive restoration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw aimed to return the course closer to Flynn’s original vision.

In Their Own Story

The heat hits you before you even reach the first tee. You can smell it from the parking lot—that warm, sun-baked fescue smell, like the earth itself is exhaling. The dunes catch the morning light and turn the whole South Fork into a pale, golden landscape, and somewhere out past the 14th green, the Atlantic is doing what it always does: reminding you that you are a very small person playing a very old game on a very narrow strip of land between the dunes and the sea.

A caddie walks up to the 16th tee, sets down the bag, and says, quietly, 'Watch the wind off the water. It'll be there by the time your ball lands.' You nod. You always nod. You hit the drive, and the ball floats out over the fescue, and for a second it looks like it might just clear the dune, and then the wind does what the wind does, and the ball drifts left into the cotton-candy rough, and you stand there in the 95-degree heat with a 7-iron in your hand and a green that looks a thousand yards away, and you think: this is why people come here. This is why they keep coming back. Not for the beauty, exactly, though the beauty is there. For the feeling of being tested by something older and more patient than any human ambition.

The gallery on the 18th is a wall of sunburned, hat-brimmed faces, and someone in the back is singing, off-key and joyful, and a kid on a parent's shoulders is pointing at the flagstick, and the caddie is already reading the wind again, and the heat is a living thing pressing down on the fescue, and the golf, the honest, brutal, beautiful golf, is just about to begin.

Reader's Guide

Shinnecock Hills is a true links-style course built on sandy, rolling terrain with few trees. The course measures over 6,900 yards. Notable holes include the 7th (Redan), a par 3 modeled after North Berwick; the 9th (Ben Nevis), a demanding uphill par 4; the 11th (Hill Head), a short but tricky par 3; the 14th (Thom's Elbow), a long par 4; the 16th (Shinnecock), a par 5 over 600 yards; and the 18th (Home), a classic uphill finisher with the clubhouse beyond the green. The routing by Flynn showcases multiple wind directions and offset angles. The course has hosted the U.S. Open six times (1896, 1986, 1995, 2004, 2018, and 2026) and is scheduled to host a seventh in 2036.

Did You Know?

• Shinnecock Hills is one of the five charter clubs that formed the USGA in 1894.
• The club built what is often cited as the first golf clubhouse in the U.S., designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1892.
• From its inception, Shinnecock admitted women members, one of the first American golf clubs to do so.
• The 1896 U.S. Open at Shinnecock featured John Shippen, the first African-American golf professional, and Oscar Bunn, a Shinnecock Indian.
• The course was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.