Winged Foot Golf Club: West Course

Winged Foot Golf Club's West Course is a celebrated championship venues in American golf. Located in Mamaroneck, New York, the club features two A.W. Tillinghast-designed courses, with the West Course serving as the primary host of major championships and widely regarded as a standout tests of golf in the world.

Winged Foot Golf Club was founded in 1921 by a consortium of members from the New York Athletic Club who desired a golf facility worthy of their organization's competitive traditions. The club's name and winged-foot logo were taken directly from a sculpture in the lobby floor of the NYAC's Manhattan headquarters, honoring the fleet-footed Greek god Mercury. The founders purchased a 280-acre tract in Mamaroneck, New York, in the rolling hills of Westchester County, and engaged Albert Warren Tillinghast to design the courses. Tillinghast, already a prolific and respected architect in the country, received what has become a standout famous commission in golf history: the instruction to build two "man-sized courses" that would test the finest golfers in the game. The West and East Courses opened for play in June 1923, with the Clifford Charles Wendehack-designed clubhouse completed in 1925. Tillinghast's design philosophy at Winged Foot was rooted in bold, uncompromising construction. He sculpted the naturally rolling terrain into a course defined by its raised green complexes, many of them elevated several feet above the approaching fairways. These greens are not easy targets even from the ideal angles, and they become extraordinarily difficult when approached from the wrong side of the fairway. The bunkering is deep, strategically placed, and visually intimidating, framing the greens and fairways with precision. Tillinghast believed that every hole should be a demanding par and a potential birdie -- that challenge and opportunity should coexist on every shot. The West Course is the fullest expression of this philosophy, with eighteen holes that relentlessly examine a golfer's ability to drive the ball accurately, control approach distances, and navigate complex putting surfaces. The course does not rely on water hazards or extreme length; its difficulty is inherent in the architecture itself. The West Course's championship history is among the richest of any venue in the world, with six U.S. Opens providing a narrative arc that spans nearly a century. The first came in 1929, when the championship was supposed to be held on the East Course but was shifted to the West after storm damage. Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur in the game's history, won his third U.S. Open title by defeating Al Espinosa in a 36-hole playoff by a staggering 23 strokes -- a standout lopsided margins in major championship history. The 1959 U.S. Open brought Billy Casper his first major championship. The twenty-eight-year-old Californian outlasted an era-defining field that included Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Arnold Palmer, winning with a score of 282. Casper's masterful putting -- he needed only 114 putts over 72 holes, including 31 one-putts with just a single three-putt -- was the decisive factor in a championship played on a course that punished anything less than complete precision. The 1974 U.S. Open produced the event that gave the West Course its most enduring sobriquet: "The Massacre at Winged Foot." The USGA prepared the course with the deepest, most uniform rough in Open history at that time -- six inches of thick, grabbing grass that lined every fairway. The course was so demanding that not a single player was under par after any round during the entire four days of competition. Hale Irwin won with a score of seven over par 287, the highest winning total at a U.S. Open in decades. The championship became a landmark moment in the ongoing conversation about the balance between challenge and playability at the U.S. Open. The 1984 U.S. Open is remembered for a standout sportsmanlike gestures in tournament golf. Fuzzy Zoeller and Greg Norman tied at four under par 276 after 72 holes. On the final hole, Zoeller -- unable to see the green from the fairway -- watched Norman sink a long putt and, believing it was for birdie and the win, playfully waved a white towel in mock surrender.

In fact, Norman had putted for par to force a playoff. The following day, Zoeller dominated the 18-hole playoff, shooting 67 to Norman's 75, an eight-stroke victory. The 2006 U.S. Open will forever be defined by the man who lost rather than the man who won. Phil Mickelson came to the eighteenth hole with a one-stroke lead and needed only a par to claim the championship. Instead, he hit his tee shot left, struck a hospitality tent, and made a double bogey six to finish one stroke behind Geoff Ogilvy, whose winning score of five over par 284 underscored the course's unforgiving nature. Ogilvy became the first Australian to win the U.S. Open since David Graham in 1981. The most recent U.S. Open at Winged Foot came in 2020, delayed to September due to the COVID-19 pandemic and played without spectators. Bryson DeChambeau, having transformed his body and his game through a radical power-focused approach, won by six strokes with a six-under-par total of 274. He was the only player in the field to finish under par, averaging 325 yards off the tee while hitting only 23 of 56 fairways. DeChambeau's victory demonstrated that the West Course could be conquered with power and precision, though the rest of the field's struggles proved that the Tillinghast design remained as demanding as ever for those who lacked both. Beyond the U.S. Open, the West Course hosted the 1997 PGA Championship, won by Davis Love III, bringing the club's total of major championships to seven. The venue has also staged numerous other significant events throughout its history, contributing to a championship record that few American courses can match.

Prior to the 2020 U.S. Open, the club undertook a significant restoration of the West Course under the direction of Gil Hanse. The project, completed between 2016 and 2018, focused on returning the greens to their original Tillinghast dimensions. Decades of maintenance practices had shrunk the putting surfaces by 30 percent or more from their 1923 sizes. Hanse expanded the West Course's greens by an average of 23.8 percent, recovering tucked pin positions that had not been used since the 1920s and increasing the unpinnable surface area that drives the course's strategy. The restoration brought back the severity and the opportunity of Tillinghast's original slopes while better integrating the green perimeters with the crests of the surrounding bunkers. In 2019, Winged Foot Golf Club was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, recognized as the last Tillinghast-designed course complemented by a Clifford Charles Wendehack clubhouse. In 2024, it was further designated a National Historic Landmark. The U.S. Open will return for a seventh time in 2028 -- the first since 2006 with ticketed spectators, as the 2020 edition was played behind closed doors. Winged Foot's West Course endures as one of the supreme tests in American golf. Its raised greens, deep bunkering, and demanding fairway corridors have humbled generations of the game's greatest players while producing some of the sport's most memorable championships. Tillinghast's instruction to build a "man-sized course" resulted in something more -- an architectural monument that continues to define what a championship golf course can and should be, over a century after its creation.