Scioto Country Club

When Andrew Green was hired to “restore” Scioto Country Club in 2021, the only remnant of Donald Ross’s original work was the routing. After hosting Bobby Jones’s 1926 U.S. Open victory, the 1931 Ryder Cup, and the 1950 PGA Championship, the club hired Dick Wilson in 1963 to do some work on the golf course. Wilson ended up transforming every bunker and green pad, requiring so much dirt that they had to transport it in from the state house parking garage. Greens were elevated to a post-war style with fronting bunkers and narrow entrances.  

Jack Nicklaus, who grew up on the golf course, claimed that Wilson’s version of Scioto was nothing like the Ross he grew up playing, and in 2008, he and Michael Hurdzan attempted to bring back some charm from the original design. Their project ultimately did very little to restore any of Ross’s design, and the course was again left choked with the same fronting bunkers protecting each green and fairways that pinched in at “championship” distances.

So when the club hired architect Andrew Green to complete a more full-fledged attempt at a restoration, Green utilized all the materials he could, including a handful of old photos and, most notably, an illustration by Dudley Fisher Jr., which he created for the 1926 U.S. Open. Titled “As the Dodo Bird Views the Scene of the National Open Championship 1926,” the drawing is rendered from the point of view of a bird or airplane and features a fairly detailed landscape that illustrates slopes, hazard placement, green shapes, and Ross’s vertical features. 

Green and his team began by scrubbing out the Wilson work, shaving down the green pads, and allowing the land to flow more naturally from tee to fairway to green and back to tee. Leaning on the Dodo Bird drawing, they reestablished vertical features in landing zones and around putting surfaces, creating more varied interest throughout the course. That, along with expanded fairways and repositioned bunkering, has restored a more eccentric and strategic version of Scioto that makes use of the sloping landforms that Ross utilized so cleverly.

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