Interlachen Country Club

When Bobby Jones won the 1930 U.S. Open at Interlachen (completing the second leg of what would become the game’s first Grand Slam), fellow competitor Gene Sarazen insisted the course was tougher than everything but Oakmont. In the decades that followed a series of architects including Robert Trent Jones, Geoffrey Cornish and Brian Silva worked to keep Interlachen’s edge, but nothing could staunch the march of time that made the course one-dimensional through the shrinkage of greens and the maturation of the hundreds of trees that had been planted that shadowed fairways and masked the property’s natural land movements. Enter Andrew Green in 2023, who was given the resources to strip back the layers and rebuild the course based on the blueprints Donald Ross developed in 1922 when he remodeled the course. Interlachen’s edginess is back, with ominous, strategically arranged bunkers guarding greens and fairway lines, and the expanded putting surfaces present a variety of hole locations that haven’t been seen in ages. The bunkering highlights Interlachen’s wondrous undulation, punctuating focal points like the shared rise of the second and seventh greens and the majestic rise toward the fortress the par-5 12th.