Olympia Fields Country Club (North)

Once upon a time, Olympia Fields Country Club was the largest private country club in America and it was originally founded in 1915. By 1925, the club had four golf courses with plans in the pipeline for a fifth, but the Great Depression scuppered that. WWII then forced the club into serious financial difficulties and they had to sell half their land. Three golf courses were distilled into one (now called the South course) but the gem in the Olympia Fields crown – then known as No.4 course – remained intact and it’s now a priceless jewel in America’s rich golfing heritage.

Willie Park Junior designed the No.4 course and it’s now known universally as the North. The layout was lengthened and the bunkers improved by Mark Mungeam in the 1990s but the layout we play today and indeed the layout which hosted the 2003 US Open Championship, is still ostensibly a Willie Park Junior design. It’s little wonder that Olympia Fields is one of Jim Furyk’s favourite courses. He won the 2003 US Open equalling the then-record for the lowest 72-hole score in US Open history to claim his first major title.

Apart from the North course, Olympia Fields Country Club owns the world’s largest clubhouse, which took two years to build and cost a whopping $1.3 million way back in 1925. With its eighty-foot clock tower and English Tudor design, it’s possibly the most famous clubhouse in the world and it’s a monument to the extravagant Roaring Twenties.

The North “has a good variety of holes on rolling parkland,” said Tom Doak in The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, “with a handful of steep putting surfaces, and a standout hole in the big par-4 14th, with its second shot over a creek to an elevated green. Refinements for the 2015 U.S. Amateur were especially interesting: some greenside fronting bunkers were removed as superfluous.”

Mark Mungeam developed a renovation master plan for the North course prior to the U.S. Senior Open, in 1997; further work was then completed before the 2003 U.S. Open. After later discovering key period photography, the club opted for a full restoration which Mungeam directed.

From Furyk to Bryson: Mungeam's defense of Olympia Fields