INTO THE WOODS

Throughout much of its hundred-plus-year life, Oak Hill Country Club has lived up to its name, with rows of majestic hardwoods lining its two Donald Ross designs. As part of a recent restoration, scores of those trees have been removed. But the East Course, site of this month's PGA Championship, remains a sylvan beast, dense with oaks, and just as deep in championship history.

- JOSH SENS

IN 1941, FRANK E. GANNETT, founder of the media company that still bears his name, made headlines of his own when he put forth a prize through one of his newspapers, the Times Union, in upstate New York. Gannett was a proud member of Oak Hill Country Club, on the leafy outskirts of Rochester, and he hoped to draw top talent for a tournament there.

Dangling a $5,000 purse did the trick.

That August, a luminous field, highlighted by Ben Hogan, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Sam Snead, competed in the Rochester Times-Union Open, on Oak Hill’s Donald Ross–designed East Course, with Snead breezing to a sevenshot win. Photographs from the event show a smiling Snead accepting his winner’s check, while news accounts convey what he thought of the venue.

“This course is certainly one of the finest I have ever seen,” he said. “Fit for either an Open or a PGA.”

Or more. Oak Hill has since staged those events three times each. And it’s getting set this month for its fourth PGA Championship, which will give it more turns as the tournament’s host than any club other than Southern Hills.

Throw in a pair of U.S. Amateurs, two Senior PGAs and a Senior U.S. Open and Oak Hill has welcomed all of this country’s traveling men’s majors, plus a Ryder Cup—a collection no other course can claim.

Like many of golf’s most storied designs, Oak Hill has been adjusted several times in its long life to gird against advances in the modern game; its routing rejiggered and its defenses reimagined in ways that haven’t always pleased the purists. For all the cachet it confers, hosting elite events can trigger polarizing change.