Inwood

“Despite my failure to win the British Open, 1921 was a great year for me.” Wrote Walter Hagen in The Walter Hagen Story. “I won my first PGA Championship at Inwood, Long Island when I trimmed Jim Barnes 3 and 2. It was one of my prize championships. In the morning I scored a 69 yet I was only 1 up. In the afternoon I fired a 33 on the outgoing nine to go 4 up. Barnes rallied late, but I was too far ahead for him to catch me.” Walter Hagen went on to win four further PGA Championships, a feat matched only by Jack Nicklaus.

The closing hole at Inwood Country Club is perhaps the most famous finishing hole in the New York metropolitan area, not least because this was where, in 1923, Bobby Jones won his first Major championship, the US Open. “Shot of the Century” was how Golf Magazine described Jones’s 2-iron approach that finished 6 feet from the pin. Considering water cuts across the front and right side of the green, the approach to the 18th is not for the faint-heated.

Tom Doak has been engaged at Inwood Country Club on a programme of course improvements for the last fifteen years. Commenting on the excellent Golf Club Atlas website, Doak stated: “Inwood is a neat golf course, and one of our favorite places that we've worked. We pretty much completely rebuilt the bunkering and took out a lot of trees – there aren't any trees at all now on the peninsula of 13-14-15. The original H. Strong bunkering was almost too wild to reproduce, and they didn't have many good photos of it left... but what we had, we used as license to do some pretty wild stuff. It's a very quirky routing, with three par-5's in a row on the front nine, followed immediately by back-to-back par-3's. It's also one of the busiest courses I've ever worked on... right up there with Pasatiempo.”