Royal Montreal Golf Club: Blue

Though founded in 1873 and purported to be the oldest in North America, the club has only been playing its current courses, the Blue and Red, since 1959 when it moved from a location in historic Montreal to Ile Bizard four miles west. Dick Wilson built both courses on what was mostly farmland and apple orchards, stuffing the Blue full of doglegs and deep greens requiring precision aerial approaches. Rees Jones, who remembers walking the property as a boy when his father, Robert Trent Jones, interviewed for the job, remodeled the course in 2004 and 2005, though he was respectful of Wilson’s tenets of mid-century architecture (only the 12th and 13th holes were fundamentally altered). Jones and design associate Bryce Swanson have been back to make minor tweaks, but success at the Blue will still come down to how the players navigate the formidable closing stretch where water lurks on the final five holes.