Changing Course

Since its conception, Hazeltine National has been a work in progress. Our architecture editor identifies five little-known facts about the site of the 91st PGA Championship

RemaKe BY The Lake The 402-yard, par-4 16th was reworked considerably in the late 1970s following suggestions from three influential club members.

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By Ron Whitten

Photos by Stephen Szurlej

August 10, 2009

We all know Tiger Woods finished second to Rich Beem at Hazeltine National GC in the 2002 PGA Championship, that Payne Stewart won his first U.S. Open on the course in 1991 and that Dave Hill called it a cow pasture in 1970.

Here are a few items you may not know about the Chaska, Minn., track that hosts this year's PGA Championship:

1. Robert Trent Jones wasn't its original architect

Hazeltine's origins began in the mid-1950s, when members of The Minikahda Club, one of the oldest courses in Minneapolis, became concerned that a proposed freeway would compromise their course. Club member Totton Heffelfinger (USGA president 1952-53) located land 20 miles south, along Lake Hazeltine, and brought in Chicago golf architect Robert Bruce Harris (who had just finished nearby Wayzata CC) to design a course. Harris prepared a 27-hole layout for what was termed, rather pretentiously, "The Honorable Company of Minnesota Golfers Playing at Hazeltine." (That blueprint now hangs in the Hazeltine clubhouse.)

Harris' design had the clubhouse in the same location where it was eventually built, although his faced the lake. The main 18 occupied the same land as today's course, but only one hole followed the same corridor as any hole actually built; his 10th was pretty much today's 10th.

Minikahda members voted not to build Heffelfinger's course, so he had his grain business, Peavey & Co., take an option on the land, then convinced banker Robert Fischer to get involved. Fischer was friends with Robert Trent Jones and showed the architect the land in 1959. Jones told Fischer if he couldn't create a great course on that land, he should get out of the business.

2. Once Trent Jones got involved, it was going to be an executive course

Not the par-64 kind of executive course, but a full-blown championship course for business executives. Trent suggested the club be called The Executive Golf Club of Hazeltine. He envisioned a nationwide network of Executive Clubs with reciprocal memberships. But when charter memberships were offered ($1,500 initiation fee, $400 annual dues), prospects found the name rather stuffy. So the club was quickly renamed Hazeltine, after the nearby lake, and National, to reflect the desire for a widespread membership base. "We hope within a few years to bring the national open here," Heffelfinger told sportswriter Dwayne Netland months before the club opened in 1962, and using his clout with his fellow USGA committeemen, he got his wish. Although terribly immature, Hazeltine National hosted its first U.S. Women's Open in 1966 and its first U.S. Open in 1970.

3. Dave Hill's criticism of Hazeltine was just an act

Tony Jacklin won the '70 Open at Hazeltine National, but we all remember Dave Hill, who finished second. He dominated the press accounts with his pointed barbs at the course design.

Years later, in his book Teed Off, Hill admitted he'd had four vodka tonics before entering the pressroom after his second-round three-under 69 (one of the best rounds that day), and once he found he could get some laughs, he played to the crowd for nearly an hour.

"How did you find the course?" he was asked. "I'm still looking for it," he shot back.

"Somebody ruined a good farm," he added. "A monkey is as good as a man out there.

"The man who designed this course had the blueprints upside down. All the greens slant away from you."

Complaining about the par-3 eighth hole, he said, "My two boys could come up with a better hole than that one."

Asked what the course lacked, he answered, "Eighty acres of corn and a few cows."

He finished by saying the golf course "ought to be plowed up."

(Others were equally critical, but less vocal. "You stole my lines," Arnold Palmer told Hill. "I don't think Trent Jones designed it," joked Bob Rosburg. "There are so many doglegs, I think Lassie did it.")

In hindsight, one wonders what all the fuss was about. But Hill's remarks did create a fuss. Fans "mooed" him during the final two rounds (and he threatened to send them to a slaughterhouse). Some writers chided him for his boorish behavior.