The Olympic Club: Lake Course

Home to the oldest athletic club in the United States, The Olympic Club's Lake Course is a tight, tree-lined masterpiece carved into the southwestern hills of San Francisco. The Lake Course has hosted five U.S. Opens and is renowned for producing dramatic upsets and legendary finishes.

The Olympic Club is the oldest athletic club in the United States, founded on May 6, 1860, by twenty-three charter members who had been holding informal gymnastics sessions in the backyard of Gold Rush-era artists Arthur and Charles Christian Nahl in San Francisco. Over its first half-century, the club's membership included Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, and James J. "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, the 1892 heavyweight boxing champion. But it was golf that would ultimately define the club's legacy in American sport. The Olympic Club acquired the financially struggling Lakeside Golf Club in 1918, gaining access to a property sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and Lake Merced on the western edge of San Francisco. By 1922, the club had purchased sufficient land to construct two full eighteen-hole courses. Willie Watson laid out the initial Lake and Ocean courses in 1924, but severe winter storms damaged both layouts. Sam Whiting, who had been serving as the club's superintendent, completely redesigned and rebuilt both courses. The new Lake Course opened in 1927, and Whiting would remain as superintendent until his retirement in 1954, shaping and refining the course over nearly three decades. Whiting's Lake Course is a study in restraint and strategic subtlety. The layout is famously devoid of water hazards despite its name, and it contained just a single fairway bunker, added later by Robert Trent Jones Sr. ahead of the 1955 U.S. Open. Instead, the course derives its difficulty from narrow, tree-lined fairways flanked by thousands of Monterey cypress, pine, and cedar trees, creating one of the tightest driving tests in championship golf. Whiting brilliantly routed holes across the natural slopes of the terrain rather than sending them straight up and down the hills, producing uneven lies and blind or semi-blind approaches that demand imagination and precision. The greens are characteristically small, quick, and slightly raised, generally tilted sharply forward and guarded by deep greenside bunkers. The course plays to a par of 71 at 7,186 yards following the 2009 renovation. The Lake Course has earned the moniker "The Graveyard of Champions" for the extraordinary upsets it has produced in major championship play. The legend began at the 1955 U.S. Open, when Jack Fleck, an unknown municipal course professional from Davenport, Iowa, stunned the golf world by defeating Ben Hogan in an eighteen-hole playoff. Fleck had opened with a 76 and trailed first-round leader Tommy Bolt by nine strokes, yet he clawed his way back, birdieing two of his final four holes to tie Hogan at 287 and then winning the playoff by three. In a twist of fate, Fleck played with a set of clubs bearing Hogan's name, provided to him free of charge by the Hogan company. The pattern repeated in 1966 when Billy Casper produced one of the greatest comebacks in championship history, erasing a seven-stroke deficit over the final nine holes to tie Arnold Palmer. Palmer had shot a three-under 32 on the front nine and appeared to be cruising, but he collapsed with a five-over 40 on the inward half while Casper finished with a one-under 69.

In the following day's eighteen-hole playoff, Casper won by four strokes. In 1987, Scott Simpson defeated eight-time major champion Tom Watson by a single stroke. Watson appeared poised to force a playoff on the final hole but his wedge approach came up short and spun back against the collar of the green, leaving a lengthy putt that slid just past the hole. The course claimed another favored champion. The 1998 U.S. Open saw Lee Janzen defeat Payne Stewart, and in 2012, Webb Simpson emerged from four strokes back with a final-round 68 to win at one-over-par 281, holding off Graeme McDowell and Michael Thompson by a single stroke. Across five U.S. Opens on the Lake Course, only four players in the history of the event have finished under par at the completion of seventy-two holes, a testament to the course's relentless difficulty. The Lake Course has also hosted the 2021 U.S. Women's Open, won by Yuka Saso in a playoff, and the 2025 U.S. Amateur, where Mason Howell became the fourth sixty-third seed to win a USGA championship.

The course has undergone several significant renovations through its history. Robert Trent Jones Sr. lengthened several holes and added bunkers before the 1955 U.S. Open. A comprehensive renovation was completed in 2009 by William R. Love and Frontier Golf, stretching the course from just over 6,800 yards to nearly 7,200 yards with new tee complexes on fourteen holes and a redesigned eighth hole extended by over sixty yards. Most recently, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner undertook a major restoration beginning in November 2022 and completed by September 2023. Their work peeled back decades of accumulated changes to return the course closer to Whiting's original vision, expanding fairways by twenty-five percent, enlarging putting surfaces by thirty-five percent, and widening the runways into greens to restore the ground-game options that Whiting had always intended. The seventh hole was rotated approximately fifteen degrees to the right with a new green, creating a spirited 316-yard drivable par four. The third hole, a long downhill par three, offers a distinguished views in San Francisco, while the eighteenth, a short, steep uphill par four with a treacherous approach into a tiny green, has produced countless dramatic finishes. Looking ahead, The Olympic Club will host the 2028 PGA Championship, the first time that major will be played on the property, followed by the 2032 Ryder Cup, the first to be held in California since 1959. The Lake Course, now approaching its centennial, remains a demanding and dramatic stages in championship golf.