Interlachen Country Club

Interlachen Country Club is a storied private club in Edina, Minnesota, immortalized as the site of Bobby Jones' legendary 'lily pad shot' during the 1930 U.S. Open, the third leg of his historic Grand Slam. The course was comprehensively restored by Andrew Green in 2023-2024 to honor Donald Ross's original 1919 blueprints.

Interlachen Country Club was born in 1909 when a group of golfers from the Bryn Mawr Golf Club in Minneapolis set out to establish a new private club on the rolling, lake-studded terrain southwest of the city. The name "Interlachen," meaning "between lakes," perfectly describes the property in Edina, Minnesota, where the course would take shape around Mirror Lake and adjoining wetlands set among glacial ridges. Scottish architect William Watson designed the original nine-hole course, which opened for play on July 29, 1911. The club quickly outgrew its initial layout, and by 1919 the membership had commissioned Donald Ross, already recognized as America's foremost course architect, to design a completely new 18-hole course on the property. Ross delivered his plans and the redesigned course opened in 1921, establishing the fundamental routing that survives to this day. What makes Interlachen's Ross heritage unusually well documented is that Ross's original hole-by-hole blueprints remain preserved on site, providing an extraordinarily detailed record of the architect's intentions for each green complex, bunker placement, and fairway contour. Ross's design took full advantage of the property's natural elevation changes, routing holes along glacial ridgelines, through valleys, and around Mirror Lake to create a course of constant variety and visual interest.Interlachen secured its place in golf history on July 12, 1930, when Bobby Jones won the U.S. Open on its fairways as the third leg of what would become the only single-season Grand Slam in the history of the game. Jones had already captured the British Amateur and the British Open that summer. He would complete the sweep two months later at the U.S. Amateur at Merion. At Interlachen, Jones fired rounds of 71-73-68-75 for a one-under-par total of 287 and a two-stroke victory over Macdonald Smith.

The championship was played in brutal heat approaching 100 degrees, conditions so oppressive that Jones was unable to undo his own necktie after his round and his friend O.B. Keeler had to cut it off with a pocketknife. The tournament produced one of the legendary shots in championship history. During his second round on the par-five ninth hole, Jones was attempting to reach the green in two when spectators ran onto the fairway during his backswing. He half-topped his fairway wood, and the ball appeared destined for the lake guarding the green. Instead, it skipped across the water's surface and came to rest on the far bank, just thirty yards short of the putting surface. Jones got up and down for a birdie. Witnesses swore the ball had bounced off a lily pad, and the "lily pad shot" instantly entered golf's mythology, though Jones himself later suggested the ball had simply skipped across the water like a stone. The ninth hole at Interlachen remains the course's signature, playing over Mirror Lake with the approach demanding a decision about how aggressively to challenge the water. The championship pedigree established in 1930 set the stage for a remarkable run of national events at Interlachen. The club hosted the 1935 U.S. Women's Amateur, the 1993 Walker Cup (in which the United States team dominated Great Britain and Ireland 19-5 across 24 matches), the 2002 Solheim Cup (where the United States team staged a dramatic comeback in singles to reclaim the cup 15.5 to 12.5 after trailing 9-7 entering the final day), and the 2008 U.S.

Women's Open, won by nineteen-year-old Inbee Park, who became the youngest champion in the event's history. The club has been selected to host the 2030 U.S. Women's Open, ensuring that Interlachen's championship tradition will continue well into its second century. Over the decades, the course underwent various modifications. Robert Trent Jones Sr. was retained around 1960 to survey the layout, and by 1963 revised versions of the first and third holes were put into play. A bunker renovation led by architect Mark Silva was completed in 2006-07. While these projects addressed immediate needs, they also layered changes on top of Ross's original design that gradually obscured his intent. By the early 2020s, the club's leadership recognized that a comprehensive restoration was needed, one guided by the remarkable asset of Ross's surviving blueprints. In 2023, the club engaged Andrew Green, who had established himself as the foremost practitioner of Donald Ross restorations through his acclaimed work at Scioto Country Club and other Ross courses. Green led a 14-month restoration that closed the course from spring 2023 through August 2024. Using the on-site Ross drawings as his primary evidence base, Green and his team expanded greens to their original dimensions, widened fairways from approximately 28 to 34 acres of maintained short grass, repositioned roughly 104 bunkers to their historically documented locations, lowered green surrounds to restore ground-level recovery options that Ross had intended, and reestablished the diagonal playing lines that give golfers of different abilities meaningful strategic choices. The restoration was meticulous in its attention to Ross's specific instructions.

On the ninth hole, for instance, Ross's blueprint explicitly directed shapers to "cut down the sharp ridge" and use the material "to fill in the left end of the lake," creating fair options for players of varied skill levels. Green's team honored these directions precisely. Throughout the course, the restoration returned the angular green edges and sharp-faced bunkering characteristic of Ross's era, replacing the rounded, softened features that had accumulated through decades of maintenance practices. Green's work also reconciled the course with modern playing distances, calibrating the strategic demands to challenge today's equipment while remaining true to Ross's original vision. Golf Digest awarded Interlachen its Best Renovation honor for 2024, and the restored course immediately rose in national rankings, reaching number 73 in GOLF Magazine's U.S. Top 100. The course today plays across rolling ridgelines and around Mirror Lake, with frequent elevation changes and water in play on several holes. Notable holes beyond the iconic ninth include the second and third, which climb and fall along glacial ridges; the fifth, a par three with an island-like green feel created by restored bunker wrapping; the tenth, a short par four with a sharply sloped green that punishes aerial approaches; and the eighteenth, which returns along high ground to the clubhouse in a fitting conclusion to one of America's great championship layouts. For Interlachen's members, the Andrew Green restoration has brought their course full circle, returning the design genius of Donald Ross to a property that Bobby Jones himself made immortal.