Golf's next great 'what ifs': Five courses that could benefit from a total reboot

Pebble will never have the open, dunes-like bunkers it once had for a short time in the late 1920s, which course-design aficionados love to marvel at in old photographs. Even still, there’s an enhanced and more naturalistic presentation of the architecture in the bones of the design that better matches the course’s epic coastal ruggedness, which is currently buried beneath the need to simply get people around the bucket-list course.

This stern U.S. Open and PGA Championship venue that force-feeds golfers difficult shots will get the Jones treatment—Bobby, not Trent Jones or Rees Jones who designed then redesigned the original—when Andrew Green reinvents it in the spirit of Augusta National as a strategic, thinking-person’s course beginning in the summer of 2027.

Nothing can or should be done to Bethpage Black’s wonderful routing, but the design would benefit from an infusion of Winged Foot-like character into the greens that are currently almost anti-Tillinghast in their timidness. The 18th hole could use serious reconsideration, too.

Torrey Pines sits on one of the prettiest golf course sites in America, atop coastal bluffs north of San Diego with eye-dazzling views of the Pacific. Rees Jones’ remodeling of the South Course in the early 2000s not only made the course competitive for the 2008 U.S. Open (won by Tiger Woods in a playoff over Rocco Mediate), but it also brought several coastal canyons into play for everyday play, especially on the par-3 third and par-4 14th. An annual PGA Tour stop, Torrey Pines received another boost by Jones prior to hosting its second U.S. Open in 2021, this one won by Jon Rahm.

No club has tinkered with its golf course as often or as effectively over the decades as has Augusta National Golf Club, mainly to keep it competitive for the annual Masters Tournament, an event it has conducted since 1934, with time off during WWII. All that tinkering has resulted in an amalgamation of design ideas, with a routing by Alister Mackenzie and Bobby Jones, some Perry Maxwell greens, some Trent Jones water hazards, some Jack Nicklaus mounds and swales and, most recently, extensive rebunkering and tree planting by Tom Fazio. The tinkering continues, including the lengthening of the par-4 fifth in the summer of 2018, the lengthening of the 11th and 15th holes in 2022, and the addition of 35 yards to the famed par-5 13th in 2023.