When the 2012 Ryder Cup was scheduled for Medinah's famous #3 course, tournament preparations required that several holes of Tom Bendelow's #1 course would be closed and destroyed for the infrastructure for the event. With the money the club received as host, the membership decided not just to rebuild #1 but to transform it into a brand-new 18 holes, and Renaissance Golf was enlisted to design its first 18-hole course in the Chicago area.
Several holes of the original #1 course were preserved as part of the routing, but by the end of the process nine of the eighteen holes were re-routed, to get fairways away from the nearby Medinah Road and to break away from the back-and-forth nature of the original layout.
Our new greens and bunkering have tightened up the test and make the new Course One not only a challenging test of golf, but a fun one to play.
