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    Ancient Earthworks Trodden by Golfers Become a World Heritage Site

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    The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has recognized the Octagon Earthworks in central Ohio as a cultural marvel.Nine months after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a country club must sell its lease to the state historical society that owns the land containing Native American earthworks, golfers are still pushing carts over the mounds and whacking at them with 3-irons.But now those Octagon Earthworks, which Native Americans constructed about 2,000 years ago as a means of tracking the movement of the sun and the moon through the heavens, have officially been named a UNESCO World Heritage site.“Inscription on the World Heritage List will call international attention to these treasures long known to Ohioans,” said Megan Wood, the executive director and chief executive of the Ohio History Connection, which worked with the National Park Service and the Interior Department to have a combination of eight earthworks sites in central Ohio recognized.Those sites, collectively known as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, include the Octagon Earthworks in Newark, which were created one basketful of earth at a time with pointed sticks and clamshell hoes.The designation, announced on Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, puts the earthworks among just over 1,000 World Heritage sites. There are only 25 in the United States, among them the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.“The historical, archaeological and astronomical significance of the Octagon Earthworks is arguably equivalent to Stonehenge or Machu Picchu,” Justice Michael P. Donnelly wrote in the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the state historical society, which upheld two rulings by lower courts.The recognition comes after a yearslong battle between the Moundbuilders Country Club, which had leased the land since 1910 and operated a private golf course atop the earthworks, and the Ohio History Connection, which owns the site and intends to open it as a public park.The History Connection sued the country club in 2018 in an attempt to acquire the lease, which runs through 2078. Federal officials had told the historical society that securing World Heritage recognition, which brings international acclaim and legal protection, would be impossible without full public access to the site.The club had argued that ending the lease was not necessary to establish public use and had contended that it had preserved and cared for the mounds. Its members, the president of the club’s board of trustees, David Kratoville, told The New York Times in 2021, “come out for a day and clean up sand traps and plant flowers.”After the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling last year, the country club filed a motion for reconsideration that was quickly denied.Kratoville wrote in an email on Tuesday that the country club had been good stewards of the Octagon Earthworks and welcomed their World Heritage recognition.“All we have ever asked for through this long-drawn-out situation was to be compensated fairly, thus allowing our business to continue somewhere else for our members, our community and the 100 or so people we employ,” Kratoville said.The club had said it was willing to move before the lease was up, but the parties are millions of dollars apart in their negotiations. The value of the lease will now be determined in a jury trial that is set to begin Oct. 17. More

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      At the U.S. Open, the Los Angeles Country Club Has a Rare Collection of Par 3s

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      There will be five of them at Los Angeles Country Club, including one with a stunning view of the city.If there were ever a postcard of the Los Angeles Country Club, it would show the breathtaking view from the tee box on the par-3 11th hole. Downhill and in the distance, the towers of the city skyline frame an elevated, sloping green that’s protected by three bear claw-shaped bunkers.The hole, however, is symbolic for more than its vista. It is one of five par 3s on the North Course, site of the 123rd United States Open that begins on Thursday. Together, these assorted holes are a rare sight, because the typical U.S. Open course features only four par-3 holes.In an era where massive drives are routine, this distinctive feature will test the accuracy of players trying to gauge par-3 flagsticks from as close as about 100 yards or from as far away as nearly 300. The holes form a prized collection of gems as the club hosts its first major tournament.“I think the membership looks at each of them individually because they are so different,” said Richard Shortz, past president of the club and co-chairman of the U.S. Open Committee, of the way club members see the holes. “They’re proud of them all, but they’re not clustered in a way that you can classify all five.”Justin Thomas playing a shot from a bunker on the 15th hole, one of the five par-3 holes at the L.A.C.C.Ross Kinnaird/Getty ImagesOne, though, deserves special classification: the 15th. That’s the hole for aces.Last October, Shortz was playing the course. The 15th hole played at just 78 yards during the 2017 Walker Cup, but on the day that Shortz played, it was playing at 120, because the flag was farther back in the green. Shortz struck a clean hit with his 9-iron and felt like the ball might be close to the hole. But with the pin hidden behind the front bunker, Shortz still took out his putter.When he approached the green, he didn’t see the ball until he peered into the cup, and grinned. It was Shortz’s first hole in one on the 15th.Looking ahead to the Open, he made a bold prediction for a hole that’s listed on the tournament’s scorecard at 124 yards.“I think on 15 we’ll see some holes in one,” said Shortz, who is an older brother of Will, The New York Times crossword creator. “It’s not as though it will be easy. If someone hits the right shot, well, these guys are good.”There have been noteworthy holes in one in the past month: from the Southern California club professional Michael Block at the P.G.A. Championship and from Scottie Scheffler at the Charles Schwab Challenge the following week.Scheffler, ranked No. 1 in the world, may have an advantage because he competed six years ago at the Los Angeles Country Club as an amateur in the Walker Cup, along with Collin Morikawa, who is scheduled to play in the Open.Judging by statistics, the leaders in par 3s on the PGA Tour could also be favorites: The world No. 2 Jon Rahm is ranked first in this category (averaging 2.92 strokes), followed by Max Homa (2.94). Scheffler ranks fifth.In 2013, Homa, then a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, shot a first-round 61 at the Los Angeles Country Club, en route to winning the PAC-12 tournament. Rahm, then a freshman at Arizona State, finished 10th.Still, that limited experience may not guarantee success, said the architect Gil Hanse, who in 2010 restored the George C. Thomas Jr. design from 1928.“The par 3s are not going to favor one particular type of player,” Hanse said. “Here, because you’re talking about accuracy with the wedge versus accuracy with a 3-wood, that’s a big gap to have, to have one player be able to accomplish all of those things.”Jeff Hall, the U.S.G.A.’s championship director who set up the 7,421-yard, par-70 course for the Open, marveled at the “dramatic variety” of these so-called short holes. The two longest par 3s are the 228-yard fourth and the 290-yard 11th.“Just week in and week out on tour there are just not a lot of par-3 holes that play to these kind of numbers,” he said.Each of the par 3s is problematic in its own way, marked by natural hazards and firm, tricky greens.The first par 3 — the 228-yard fourth hole — features a barranca, a dry, sandy ravine typical of Southern California, which slithers like an anaconda through the front nine. At the fourth hole, it lurks in front and then curls back behind the green. There are also two bunkers sloped off the sides of the green.“It’s a smallish target for a long hole with a lot of trouble around it,” Hanse said.In 1927 and 1928, when Thomas worked with Billy Bell to improve the original 1921 design of W. Herbert Fowler, he created some par 3s with flexibility to play as par 4s. The 284-yard seventh hole is one of those. It’s a par 3 for the Open, and it could also play at 264 yards, depending on where the tee is, Hall said.Dustin Johnson, center, lining up a putt on the seventh green at the L.A.C.C. Many have found the green especially hard to read, because of the hole’s topography.Harry How/Getty ImagesThe seventh green, though, will be particularly difficult to read because of the topography. “You feel like the putts aren’t as uphill as they actually are, because your eyes fall to the barranca, thinking it’s more downhill,” Hanse said.Following the par-5 547-yard eighth hole — one of three par 5s on the course, which is also one more than usual for a U.S. Open — players come to the final par 3 on the front nine. The ninth hole measures 171 yards on the scorecard.“It feels like it’s a level hole, but it’s really uphill and deceptive,” Hanse said. “There are four distinct quadrants in the green to move the pin around.”During a tournament, officials change the location of the pin not only to reduce wear on the greens, but also to challenge the players. Hall, who oversees the course setup in his role as the golf association’s championship director, explained that tee boxes at the Los Angeles club also have some room for the tees to move up or back. So, depending on the tee and the pin locations for a certain day, golfers could be dealing with a 30-yard variance on the eighth hole, he said.Doc Redman, Collin Morikawa, and Scottie Scheffler, left to right, played the course during the 2017 Walker Cup. Morikawa and Scheffler are scheduled to return to the course at the Open this week. Harry How/Getty ImagesThe next par 3, the 11th, will test players’ adaptability. From afar, “it’s such an amazing view, sometimes you want to stand there and not hit the tee shot,” said Shortz, the past president of the club.Up close, the 11th offers a history lesson. The green is modeled after Scotland’s 15th hole on the West Links Course at the North Berwick Golf Club. In the 19th century, when a veteran of the Crimean War was playing that famous hole, he noticed that the green protruded in front and then sloped downward right to left; the shape reminded him of a fortress from Sevastopol.The triangle jutting out beside the fortress’s entry point was called a redan. The redan has since become a feature that golf course architects love working into their course designs.For his part, Thomas turned the Los Angeles Country Club’s 11th hole into a reverse redan because the green, 39 yards deep, slopes down left to right. But the downhill carries only halfway through the green because it turns slightly uphill again, Hanse said.“It was actually quite a monumental achievement when you look at how much dirt they moved to create that,” he said. “If you look down the valley, all of a sudden there’s this protrusion of a green that sticks out into it, and that didn’t happen naturally.”The final par 3, the 15th, comes after the course’s longest hole, the par-5 623-yard 14th. Considering the 15th is followed by three stout par 4s, the first two averaging 531 yards and then the 18th at 492 yards, players might be tempted to be too aggressive on the 15th to birdie the hole before facing the rigors of the next three.Beware: Hanse put in a slight hump dividing the front sliver of the green and the main back portion of the 15th.“It’s not OK just to hit the green,” Hanse said. “You have to hit the green within the green in order to not have to worry about three-putting.”Or, like Shortz, you could just bury it in the hole and not worry at all. More

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      PGA Championship: Who Grew Oak Hill’s Namesake Trees?

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      Rob Galbraith remembers, as a child in the early 1960s, regularly going to the Rochester, N.Y., home of his great-grandfather, John R. Williams, who had been a pioneering physician in the area.Most memorable about those visits was seeing the byproduct of Williams’s amateur avocation: botany. In the backyard, there were several hundred nascent oak, elm and maple seedlings. Inside the house, acorns by the dozens were planted in dirt-filled coffee cans propped on window sills and shelves. Scores of embryonic trees germinated within a nursery on the property.“They were growing everywhere,” Galbraith, now 63, recalled in a recent interview. “All over the place.”Dr. Williams had been nurturing trees in this manner since the 1920s with one singular goal: transforming the grounds of the nearby Oak Hill Country Club from a barren parcel of overworked farmland into a lush golf course landscaped with towering hardwoods, shrubs and other verdant plants.Dr. John R. Williams University of Rochester Medical Center Miner LibraryDr. Williams, with other club members who offered assistance, did not stop the forestation crusade until tens of thousands of trees were planted over four decades. He once quipped that he had stopped counting how many new seedlings he had relocated to the club after the first 40,000.The colossal Oak Hill face-lift worked. By the late 1940s, the club, whose 36 holes were designed by the noted course architect Donald J. Ross, had been acclaimed nationally and hosted its first major golf tournament. As the course’s reputation grew in ensuing decades, three U.S. Opens, the Ryder Cup and multiple other distinguished events came to the flourishing site in western New York. This week, the fourth P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill is underway.Dr. Williams’s abiding devotion to the club’s arboriculture is also a blossoming story line this week because a recent renovation of the grounds removed hundreds of aging trees for agronomic, competitive and aesthetic reasons. It has altered the look of some holes and sparked debate, but Dr. Williams’s influence on a landmark 20th century golf course endures in the thousands of magnificent trees that remain — not just adjacent to fairways but adorning the perimeter and social areas of the 355-acre site.Commonly called the club’s patron saint, Dr. Williams, who frequented the club in work overalls and muddy boots while planting, is the man who put the oak in Oak Hill.The trees along the course played a factor in the first round of the P.G.A. Championship this year, with players like Scottie Scheffler and Keegan Bradley having to hit around trees to keep their spots near the top of the leaderboard.Dr. Williams died in 1965 at the age of 91. Shortly thereafter, during a service at the club in his honor, his granddaughter, Susan R. Williams, listened as a chorus sang a verse of Joyce Kilmer’s renowned poem put to music: “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree …”Susan R. Williams conjured that remembrance for the foreword of a book prepared for the Williams family many years ago and added another fascinating anecdote to her grandfather’s lore. He zealously scoured the world for acorns from renowned oak trees to plant at Oak Hill.“Our family vacations frequently included side trips to specific trees in search of acorns for Grandpa,” she wrote. It included getting acorns from England at Sherwood Forest and the Shakespeare oak at Stratford-on-Avon, and from the oaks planted by George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va. And it was not just family members who were recruited for the international harvest.“When people in the armed services left Rochester and went to various parts of the world, they knew to send back acorns to Dr. Williams,” Galbraith said. “Schoolchildren on vacations did the same thing and brought some back home with them.”He added: “The community was a lot smaller then, and while I don’t know how he did it, my great-grandfather was very proficient at getting the word out that he was collecting acorns.”It did not hurt that Dr. Williams was one of Rochester’s most prominent citizens — and with good reason.A tree planted in honor of Dr. John R. Williams at the Rochester Regional Health building near downtown Rochester.Raised in Canada, Dr. Williams’s family arrived in Rochester when he was a teenager. Galbraith, who is the first linear descendant of Dr. Williams to join Oak Hill Country Club, said his great-grandfather became a teacher and later graduated from the University of Michigan’s medical school. As the chief of medicine at a Rochester hospital, Dr. Williams became nationally recognized for his research on blood analysis, and in 1916, he established a laboratory that became a leader in the study of metabolic disorders, chiefly diabetes.Six years later, Dr. Williams was recognized as the first physician in the United States to administer insulin to a diabetic patient. He also surveyed 7,000 Rochester homes to study the safety of the city’s milk supplies and found dangerous, unsatisfactory refrigeration conditions that would lead to illness. He rewrote refrigeration standards, including those that applied to milk delivery trucks. Some of his guidelines were instituted nationwide.Coming to the aid of his community seemed to come naturally to Dr. Williams, who was active in many civic endeavors, especially within the city’s museum community. After Oak Hill moved from its original downtown location to the Rochester suburb of Pittsford in 1926, he began to extensively study the botany of trees in hopes of improving the vast but cheerless property where the golf courses would be situated.Dr. Williams took on the project altruistically, not necessarily for personal benefit.“What’s most interesting about Dr. Williams is that he wasn’t really a golfer,” said Sal Maiorana, a longtime Rochester sportswriter whose 2013 book painstakingly chronicled Oak Hill’s history. “He joined the club specifically as a social thing. But he became fascinated with trees, put in a tremendous amount of time understanding everything about them and consulted arborists around the world. He knew he could help the club, and the Oak Hill board of directors realized that he was the man for the job.”Groundskeepers at Oak Hill preserve Dr. Williams’s tree-planting legacy, sometimes having to shave off a few branches.But 40,000 trees planted? From a practical standpoint, how?“It is a lot of trees, but actually I’d always heard it was 50,000,” Galbraith said with a chuckle. “But he lived to be 91 so he did it consistently over a long period of time. And he had people help plant the trees.”He added: “If you look at everything he accomplished throughout this entire life, he was one of those individuals who would set his mind to things and then just do it.”Dr. Williams’s affinity for trees led to another permanent contribution to the club’s grounds: a living tribute to noteworthy contributors to golf called the Hill of Fame. Beginning in 1956, Dr. Williams began selecting trees on a rise adjacent to the 13th hole on the club’s East Course that would be affixed with bronze plaques commemorating such golfing luminaries as Ben Hogan, Annika Sorenstam, Lee Trevino and Nancy Lopez. The unveiling of each plaque has included a ceremony. To date, 45 people, including amateur golfers and administrators, have been recognized. A tree, Dr. Williams liked to say, was a surviving legacy far superior to a gravestone in a cemetery.In the early 1990s, a northern red oak seedling grown inside Oak Hill’s nursery was transplanted onto manicured grass between the former Genesee Hospital in Rochester (now a medical facility) and an adjacent parking garage. The tree has since sprouted more than 25 feet, giving shade to a walkway used by health workers and visitors.The choice of site for the planting of this particular seedling was not accidental. It was once the property of Dr. Williams, where he lived and operated his medical practice and wandered into his backyard with fledgling trees.Over and over, and over, again.The practice range is kept clear of foliage but the tree line is not far. More

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      PGA Championship: Why Doesn’t Oak Hill Produce Bigger Champions?

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      Golf clubs often gain fame when top players win there. That hasn’t happened much lately at this club, this year’s P.G.A. Championship host. The reason is complicated.The Oak Hill Country Club in northwestern New York, the site of the P.G.A. Championship that begins on Thursday, has hosted a dozen major or national championships, including United States Opens, previous P.G.A. Championships, and a Ryder Cup.It’s a classic course that was designed by Donald Ross, a revered Golden Age architect, and recently restored by Andrew Green, a top architect whose work has revived other championship venues, including Congressional Country Club, the site of last year’s KPMG Women’s P.G.A. Championship.On paper, Oak Hill looks great. But it’s dogged by a somewhat academic question in golf: Why hasn’t it produced better champions in recent years? The players who have won on the course are not a who’s who of hall-of-fame players.Shaun Micheel won the P.G.A. Championship there in 2003, for his only PGA Tour victory. Jason Dufner, who set the course record in winning the P.G.A. there in 2013, has won five PGA Tour events, but has a reputation for being ultra relaxed during play. The term “Dufnering” was coined to describe his demeanor, during both tournaments and the off-season.The course, in Pittsford, N.Y., near Rochester, has also hosted two Senior P.G.A. Championships, won in 2008 by the journeyman pro Jay Haas and in 2019 by Ken Tanigawa, a former amateur who qualified for the Champions Tour the year before after turning 50.So what gives?It’s complicated.The fourth hole on the course at the Oak Hill Country Club. Like many championship venues, the club added more trees in the 1960s and ’70s, believing that would create a tougher course.Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesThe United States hosts three of golf’s major championships, with two of them rotating from course to course every year. (The Masters Tournament is always held at Augusta National Golf Club.) By comparison, only the British Open, the fourth major, rotates around Britain.But the United States Golf Association has laid claim to a series of classic, stout tests of golf to host the U.S. Open. In doing so, it has created a de facto rota of courses, including Winged Foot Golf Club in New York, Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania, Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina and Pebble Beach Golf Links in California, along with a mix of other prewar courses, including the Country Club in Massachusetts and Merion Golf Club in Pennsylvania. The governing body has embraced a schedule where some venues are locked in decades in advance, under the guise that where you win your U.S. Open championship matters to players as much as the win itself does.“The U.S.G.A. has said you have to be 100-plus years old to host a U.S. Open, and they’re going to the finest golf courses in the world, and it’s a short rota,” said Ran Morrissett, a founder of Golf Club Atlas, which analyzes course architecture. “Who’s to argue the governing body is making a mistake going to the finest courses in the world?”But the U.S.G.A laying claim to great courses decades in advance — Merion, for instance, is already set to host the 2030 and the 2050 U.S. Opens — has created a division of sorts: A club is either a venue where the U.S.G.A. hosts the U.S. Open, or it’s a P.G.A. of America site, playing host to such events as the men’s and women’s P.G.A. Championships, and, sometimes, the Ryder Cup competition.Has the P.G.A. been left with weaker venues? Some golf historians say that it has, while others argue that the picture is more complicated than that, given that older courses are being revamped, and challenging new courses are being built all the time.“It’s almost impossible for the P.G.A. Championship to compete,” said Connor T. Lewis, chief executive of the Society of Golf Historians. “Oakmont is a U.S.G.A. anchor site now. They’ve had the U.S. Open nine times.”While Oakmont had hosted the P.G.A. Championship three times, he added, now that the course has become a U.S.G.A. anchor, hosting the P.G.A. Championship is “off the table.”Still, he’s optimistic that the changes made to this year’s P.G.A. Championship venue are going to present golfers with different challenges from the last time, when the P.G.A. was played at a very different Oak Hill. “This year we’re going to see Oak Hill at its very best,” he said. “It’s going to be way more a Donald Ross course.”Like many great championship venues, Oak Hill added nonoriginal features in the 1960s and 1970s under the belief that more trees equated to a tougher course. It worked for a while, but as those trees grew, they narrowed the fairways and limited the shotmaking options.Other courses also followed this path, including Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey, which will host the P.G.A. Championship in 2029. After Phil Mickelson, who has now won a total of six majors, won the P.G.A. there in 2005, Jimmy Walker won the 2016 P.G.A. there, his only major. The course has since been restored by Gil Hanse to open it up and bring back the original A.W. Tillinghast design.Like other classic courses that have recently hosted major championships, Oak Hill underwent an extensive restoration that undid many modern changes. The restoration of the course by Green, who removed trees and opened up the course, could broaden the number of possible champions this year.Morrissett, the Golf Club Atlas founder, said the changes could make a difference in the quality of the champion this time. “Given that Oak Hill is more a classic Donald Ross course now, it could produce a Ben Hogan-like winner,” he said, referring to one of the best players of the 1950s. “I like the fact that a thoughtful player could win.”Kerry Haigh, the chief championships officer at the P.G.A. of America — whose job it is to set up the courses for a major like this — concedes that recent P.G.A. champions at Oak Hill benefited from the course conditions then.Phil Mickelson on the 18th green of the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Golf Resort, at the 2021 P.G.A. Championship. Mickelson held off Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen to win.Sam Greenwood/Getty ImagesBefore its restoration, there was “certainly a premium on driving accuracy, as the fairways are fairly narrow and the rough is usually pretty tough,” he said. “With the trees playing an important part of the challenge, the past two winners were not particularly long hitters, but were able to control their game and keep their ball in play.”Haigh said that the course setup is what matters most. The P.G.A. has put its stamp on tough, but fair, setups that allow for some exciting charges on Sunday. (This stands in contrast to the U.S.G.A. It sets up each course to be a stern — some players contend, brutal — test of golf. When Bryson DeChambeau won the U.S. Open in 2020 at Winged Foot, one of the anchor sites, he was the only player to break par for the four days.)Some historians argue that even going to these classic courses is a mistake for the P.G.A. Morrissett said with the U.S.G.A.’s lock on older courses, the P.G.A. should look to great courses built after 1960, to showcase the variety of golf in America. He points to the 2021 P.G.A. Championship at the Ocean Course on Kiawah Island in South Carolina, a Pete and Alice Dye design that opened in 1991, as one of the more exciting and watchable Sunday finishes in recent major history, when Mickelson held off Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen at the 2021 P.G.A. Championship to become the oldest major champion.“I loved the finish,” Morrissett said. “A par 5 you could eagle or double bogey? That’s exciting.”He ticked off modern courses like Erin Hills in Wisconsin, Chambers Bay in Washington State, and the newly opened P.G.A. Frisco course in Texas, which is set to be a hub for the P.G.A. “I think there’s a nice symmetry to watching these guys play courses that were designed for today’s equipment,” he said.Haigh, the chief championships officer, said that including those newer courses had been part of the P.G.A.’s plan. “That’s been our philosophy to mix classic courses with more modern courses,” he said, ticking off Bellerive in Missouri and Valhalla in Kentucky, in addition to Kiawah. “It’s been our philosophy for the 30 years I’ve been here, and I expect it will continue.”Still, his focus is on this week, and he’s optimistic that Oak Hill will produce a deserving champion. “It seems there may be more options for players who do miss the fairways, but they are still the same width as in previous years,” he said. “We shall see.” More