Wild, beautiful, Shinnecock Hills is the perfect test for golf’s ultimate test

Shinnecock Hills, this year’s host US Open, lures you in with its majestic club, up on a hill and oh so lovely. Then there’s the course, beastly and beautiful—a perfect exam for golf’s ultimate test. So how have players treated this New York golf icon? Some, not so well. (Here’s looking at you, Lefty.) Others have been in the right frame of mind.

As with other amazing creatures, you have to see Shinnecock Hills up close to fully appreciate its complexity. Up close and over time. Awesome, yes, but humorous like you wouldn’t believe! The brilliant path has changed over the decades, as all living things do. But Shinnecock also changes during every single day—especially in the long days of early summer. It’s like the Old Course in that way, or Dornoch or Troon. Shinnecock Hills, on the sandy South Branch of Long Island, is our welcome to the homeland. Some of the holes have Scottish names. (Ben Nevis, Redan.) But also Native American names: Peconic, Sebonac, Montauk and Shinnecock. How convenient. The course was built by Shinnecock men, using a template imported from Scotland.

No one is left from the 1896 Open at Shinnecock Hills, but there are still many boats of us who were ready for the return engagement, 90 years after the first engagement. Jack Nicklaus, the reigning Masters champion, played his first round of the ’86 US Open on a damp, wet afternoon. The Golden Bear lay on the nine, passed Stanford White’s clubhouse, and then watched his tee shot in 10 furlongs over a wide strip of rough yellow and toward a patch of unruly bushes. For the first time as a professional, Nicklaus had lost a golf ball. He made the lone walk back to the tee, driver in hand, looking like he’d just buried his dog. Three days later, Ray Floyd, North Carolina’s longtime pro and son of a boy, hugged the Open trophy, his eyes narrowed at the glow of the afternoon and the moment. Father’s Day, 1986. Raymond was reborn, and so was the course.

The third open at Shinnecock was in 1995. Let’s roll the tape on Corey Pavin on Sunday 18: driver; 4-wood; with two par shots on a green with more tilt than a pinball machine. After battling the course for four days, Pavin had shot 280, even for par. Fair putt golf does not play at Shinnecock Hills. At least, it doesn’t win. Cheeky little Corey Pavin won by two.

For Shinnecock’s fourth Open, in 2004, the course was still under 7,000 yards, but this time it was dying of thirst. Phil Mickelson had another tough second place finish and Retief Goosen won. Fourteen years later (No. 5; 2018), Phil was still nursing a Shinnecock Hills/USGA hangover. You may remember that moment when he went berserk, turning his puck into a hockey stick and his puck into a ball. Brooks Koepka won, by one shot over Tommy Fleetwood. Tom Watson said Koepka was the real deal, a player with all the tools. Tom Watson. Not known for effusiveness. But Koepka did what he did at Shinnecock and it made all the difference. Koepka will be 36 when the US Open comes to Shinnecock Hills for the sixth time in June. Thirty something and US Opens – there’s a long marriage there.

Watson only won the US Open at Pebble Beach (at age 32), and you’re tempted to say that Pebble is to the West Coast what Shinnecock is to the East, but it’s not. There is no excitement in Shinnecock Hills, and it is the opposite of the public. (The club’s roots are old, elitist, exclusionary WASP.) Shinnecock’s three neighbors — National Golf Links, Southampton Golf Club, Sebonack Golf Club — are sprinkled with moments of whimsy and funk. Shinnecock explodes logically throughout its 260 rolling, treeless acres, with beautiful fairways that act as wind tunnels. From start to finish the course is… sound. Fat, demanding and relentless. Somehow, Tommy Fleetwood shot a 63 Sunday as Koepka won. That’s like shooting 60 at Augusta.

He was 27 then, 35 now and will be 45 when the Open returns to Shinnecock for meeting no. 7, in 2036. Raymond Floyd was 43 when he won 40 years ago. He bought a house in Southampton and joined the club and could be seen, on occasion, slipping from the car park to the clubhouse in dainty loafers and metal-framed shades. The ’86 Open turned Floyd into a superstar. The 2018 Open, for Koepka, did the same.

That club, broadly similar to Muirfield in Scotland, sits atop Shinnecock’s highest hill. To visitors and members, to passing motorists, the clubhouse is a beacon, an antiquated landmark of the American game. With its sturdy white columns around the perimeter and sentinel flagpoles on the east and west sides, the Shinnecock clubhouse makes a proud here-we-stand statement.

But let’s consider another orientation here, an unlikely orientation, from the back on the 4th hole, in an almost rural corner of the course, deep in its northernmost reach. If you could climb up with a cherry-picker from that tee and look south, you’d see it all: the pale and wild course; nice club; the east-west tracks of the Long Island Rail Road; gas stations and shopping centers; modern mansions in old potato fields; ocean beaches; the dark wonder of the Atlantic.

Then, somewhere beyond the horizon and in your drifting mind, the old country itself, the birthplace of all this imported, crazy wonder. At Shinnecock, nothing was lost in transit. It has those fairways with chips, ball-eating bushes, magic carpet greens plus, at the Open, a drinking vessel trophy that awaits the winner. Enter the golfers, from all over the world, the latter fed and encouraged by the vague promise of ecstasy.