Design Notebook: What Makes a Great Set of Major Championship Greens

Hello, Fried Egg Golf Club members, and welcome to your May edition of Design Notebook. To paraphrase Kerry Haigh, we’ve challenged ourselves to make this the greatest article we’ve ever published. By doing what, you ask? Well, by making it so that you, the readers, enjoy it. Does that answer your stupid little question? Leave us alone!

All right, moving on…

In today’s DN, I dig into a factor that differentiates great major championship golf courses from merely good ones: green design. I also offer some thoughts on the upcoming PGA Championship venues and break some news about Muirfield’s architectural future.

Major Greens

Quail Hollow Club is a serviceable major championship venue. It is by no means terrible, but it doesn’t produce much excitement of its own volition, in spite of the club’s marketing efforts around the “Green Mile” (holes 16-18). The course is just missing… something.

During past tournaments at Quail Hollow, I had a hard time defining what that “something” was. But as I watched the PGA Championship last week, I realized that it mostly boils down to green design. The primary element that Quail Hollow lacks — and that almost* all great major championship venues have — is architecturally distinctive and compelling green complexes. 

(*I’m tempted to take out the word “almost” here, but I’d rather not deal with the inevitable emails pointing out that Pebble Beach doesn’t have particularly interesting greens. Let’s save the debate over whether Pebble is actually a great major championship venue for another day.)

In order to understand what Quail Hollow’s greens are missing, let’s look at this year’s other major championship courses. Each offers a useful case study in green design.

‍Augusta National Golf Club (The Masters) — If you’re a Design Notebook reader, you know the basic characteristics of Augusta National’s greens: they are large, fast, sharply undulating, minimally bunkered, and surrounded by short grass. Their ferocity comes from the severity of the contouring and the speed of the turf. Inaccurate (or tactically unsound) approach shots careen away from pins in unpredictable, terrifying ways. Recoveries call on a vast array of short-game skills: the bump-and-run, the low spinner, the Texas wedge, the Mickelson flop, and so on. As a test of a player’s mind, mettle, and full skill set, Augusta National’s greens set the gold standard in championship golf.

Oakmont Country Club (U.S. Open) — As Andy Johnson and I discussed on a recent episode of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast, Oakmont’s greens are remarkable not just for their speed but also for their slope. Many of them simply follow the lay of the land: if the terrain runs precipitously away from the player, so does the putting surface. According to some quick Google Earth measurements by the Fried Egg Golf team, the 12th green falls three-and-a-half feet from front to back. That kind of tilt is unheard of in modern golf architecture. Add in quirky green shapes and deep bunkers, and Oakmont often puts you in untenable positions after poor approach shots. I have first-hand experience:

‍Royal Portrush Golf Club (Open Championship) — Since I haven’t been to Royal Portrush, I asked my colleague Matt Rouches, who went on Fried Egg Golf’s Eggsplorations trip to Northern Ireland last year, to weigh in with his thoughts on the course’s greens:

“One thing that I love about Royal Portrush's greens is the unique green sites chosen by Harry Colt, which sit so naturally within the terrain. This creates tremendous variety between them. Greens like 4, 10, 11, 13, and 17 sit down in low points or between dunes, creating more funneling contours. On the other hand, there's a healthy dose of greens perched up from the natural grade or benched into a dune, creating repelling slopes. This is seen on holes like 2, 8, 12, 14, and 16. At the same time, what I just described is certainly an overgeneralization, as the natural landscape is much more varied and... natural. Another thing that makes these greens so dynamic is the thoughtful internal contouring, which is not terribly common on older links courses. The combination of great natural green sites and the gentle yet proficient hand of Colt makes Royal Portrush's greens stand out in the Open rota.”

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Well said, Matt. I’ll add that because Royal Portrush’s green sites are so varied and natural, players will face a multitude of short-game challenges. After missing a green, you never know where you’ll end up: on short grass, in short rough, in gnarlier native vegetation, below or above the putting surface, on a downhill or uphill or sidehill lie. So the punishment for a bad approach shot isn’t just a difficult recovery; it’s the terror of uncertainty and variability.

Now think about what we just saw at the PGA Championship. Quail Hollow’s greens are elegantly constructed and beautifully maintained, but they lack the contouring of Augusta National’s, the tilt of Oakmont’s, and the variety and naturalness of Royal Portrush’s. They lack, in other words, individuality. Severity. Plain old weirdness. 

Last week, the pros faced two basic types of short-game shots: a standard splash-out from a bunker and a standard hack-out from the rough, both best performed with a 60-degree wedge. These shots could be difficult (primarily because the SubAir-assisted putting surfaces were firm and fast throughout the week), but they were largely predictable. When players missed their targets from the fairway, they knew what they were getting. 

And just as important, so did we.

Next Up for the PGA

The PGA of America has announced the following sites for future PGA Championships:

2026 — Aronimink Golf Club

2027 — PGA Frisco

2028 — The Olympic Club (Lake Course)

2029 — Baltusrol Golf Club (Lower Course)

2030 — Congressional Country Club (Blue Course)

2031 — The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island

2032 — Southern Hills Country Club*

2034 — PGA Frisco

(*During a press conference last week, PGA of America Chief Championships Officer Kerry Haigh announced that Southern Hills will be the site of the 2032 PGA Championship. This will be the second time the Perry Maxwell design in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has hosted the event since Gil Hanse’s 2019 historical renovation.)

The good news: none of these sites is an annual PGA Tour stop, and all of them have more auspicious architectural pedigrees than Quail Hollow. That said, most of the lineup lends itself to Kerry Haigh’s somewhat bland approach to championship setup. As I wrote on X a couple of days ago, Haigh’s philosophy is essentially:

1. Don’t allow the course to be the story. This means not letting scores get either too high or too low, and perhaps not worrying too much about booking iconic venues.

2. Disproportionately reward a skill set that is commonly rewarded on the pro tours (i.e., hitting the ball long, straight, and high) so that “big names” are likely to top the leaderboard come Sunday.

3. Work to limit separation in scoring in order to increase the likelihood that a bunch of players will be in the mix down the stretch.

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This setup strategy won’t be difficult to implement at traditional parkland courses like Aronimink, Olympic, Baltusrol, and Congressional. Expect those PGA Championships to resemble the 2023 edition at Oak Hill Country Club: rough-choked, bomber-friendly, and damp. (Obviously you can’t predict the weather years in advance, but we’re talking about mid-May in Philly, San Francisco, New Jersey, and the DMV, respectively. Oof. I guess SF might be nice?) Southern Hills belongs roughly to the same category, but its clever Perry Maxwell design and short-grass surrounds give it a bit more potential for excitement. 

The true outliers in the rota are the Ocean Course and, ironically, Gil Hanse’s new Fields Ranch East at the PGA’s new headquarters in Frisco, Texas. These open, windswept, modern courses will bring a welcome dose of unpredictability to the championship.

Muirfield Hires Mackenzie & Ebert

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, the club based at the famed Muirfield links, has hired Mackenzie & Ebert to oversee course renovations, a source tells Fried Egg Golf. The nature and extent of the UK-based firm’s brief have not yet been determined.

The commission extends Mackenzie & Ebert’s striking dominance over the recent and potential future Open Championship rota. The firm has implemented changes at Royal Birkdale (host of the 2026 Open), Royal Portrush (2025), Royal Troon (2024), Royal Liverpool (2023), Royal St. George’s (2022), and Carnoustie (2019). Some of this work has received mixed reviews from… well, Fried Egg Golf. M&E has also signed on with Portmarnock Golf Club, rumored to be in line to become the first course outside of the UK to host the Open Championship.

Does the Honourable Company’s decision to bring on the R&A-approved firm indicate that the club expects to host the Open again soon? Perhaps. Martin Slumbers indicated last year that the R&A would be open to the idea.

I just hope that Mackenzie & Ebert use a lighter touch at Muirfield than they did at Royal Liverpool and Royal Birkdale. Flashy sand scrapes and cookie-cutter green-side swales would be a sorry sight at the old, austere links.

Chocolate Drops

→ From the “hell yeah” files: the 2025 and 2026 Australian Opens will be held at Royal Melbourne Golf Club and Kingston Heath Golf Club, respectively, and Rory McIlroy has committed to play in both editions. Venues matter, and you’d be hard-pressed to find two better ones than Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath.

→ Big Cedar Lodge announced a new 18-hole par-3 course called Cliffhangers. Keywords: caves, waterfalls, golf carts. My understanding is that Jackson Kahn Design worked on this project — and indeed the bunkers have a distinctly Jackson Kahnian look — but the press materials emphasize the design contributions of Big Cedar owner Johnny Morris and his son J.P. Huh.

→ The membership of Sequoyah Country Club in Oakland, California, has approved a renovation plan by Jay Blasi.

→ Gil Hanse’s overhaul of Maggie Hathaway, a public short course in Los Angeles, continues apace. Check out this video update from a couple of months ago.

→ 7 Mile Beach in Tasmania, which I discussed with developer Mat Goggin in 2023, has opened for preview play and is targeting a full debut in December.

A Course We Photographed Recently

‍The Old Course at St. Andrews (St. Andrews, Scotland)—designed by nature, St. Andrews citizens, and Old Tom Morris; not yet renovated by Mackenzie & Ebert

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Quotable

“It does not seem to follow that because a man is a good player he is a good judge of a course.” - Harry Colt