U.S. Open at Shinnecock: Wide fairways, wind and other key factors to solving difficult course

This championship has potential to become known as the U.S. Wide Open.

That is not necessarily a commentary on the number of possible winners. Sometimes the leaderboard is wide open, sometimes it is not. No, what will make this Open wide are the fairways at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club.

“The fairways are very generous. They’re more generous than they were in 2018,” said Rory McIlroy, who stopped in Southampton before playing the Memorial Tournament last week. “If you miss the fairway, I feel like you deserve a bad lie.”

In returning to its most tradition-rich club, the U.S. Golf Association this week will depart from its longtime Open template: narrow landing areas and forced hacking from dense rough. This time, the fairways will average 48 yards wide — the widest for a U.S. Open in about 75 years, said John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s Chief Competitions Officer.

The idea is to allow golfers to have at it. Let them fire away at the fast, curvy Shinnecock greens that often resemble upside-down cereal bowls.

“The fairways are generous enough that you have opportunity,” said Scottie Scheffler, who also visited last week with hopes of completing the career Grand Slam with a U.S. Open victory. “It's just that the green complexes are extraordinarily difficult, and so they can put the pins wherever they want and make the scores as high as they could possibly want them to be.”

USGA officials believe this year’s setup is faithful to the vision of architect William Flynn, who designed the current layout in 1931 — 35 years after the club hosted its first U.S. Open. Their mantra for 2026 is “Let Shinnecock be Shinnecock.”

That, coincidentally, is pretty much what golfers had been pleading for in the past two controversial Shinnecock Opens, 2004 and 2018. Put another way, players wished the USGA would let well enough alone. Especially in the former season and to an extent in the latter, officials allowed the course to get dry and brown, believing that would make it tougher. The result was a torrent of criticism and one apparent outright protest: Phil Mickelson deliberately hit a moving ball on the 13th green eight years ago.

With due respect to Flynn, Bodenhamer and everyone in between, the most important factor at Shinnecock is something no designer or committee can control: It is all about the wind. Gusts are almost always present off the Atlantic Ocean and Peconic Bay, but when they are not, Shinnecock can be tamed. That happened in the past two Opens in Southampton, persuading the USGA to let the ground bake.

If it is windy this week, Shinnecock’s traits will stand tall. Flynn’s routing made sure that holes go every which way, meaning that breezes will be at golfer’s backs sometimes, in their faces sometimes, to either side sometimes.

“Flynn was unique. He was brilliant,” Bodenhamer said. “Unlike most architects of his day, he certainly used deception, he used angles, he used nuances. But he was an engineer and he started with the putting green and worked backward.”

That is what normal Shinnecock winds will require from golfers this week. They must think about the undulating greens on every shot, preparing just the right height and angle. There is no greenside rough this time (unlike previous Shinnecock Opens), so a shot that is too short, too long or too wide will roll far away. If a blast from a deep bunker is not hit crisply enough, the ball will roll back into the sand.

Fans will gravitate toward risk-filled holes such as the 157-yard par-3 11th. Forty years ago, Lee Trevino jokingly called it “The shortest par 5 in golf.” A golfer can’t see the elevated green from the tee, but knows that it is sloped and guarded by bunkers on the front and right, and fraught with trouble left and long. Brooks Koepka saved bogey there in the final round eight years ago. Bodenhamer believes Koepka won the U.S. Open right there.

Pros respect that kind of challenge. They love Shinnecock Hills — when it is at least slightly green.

“The greens are rolling around 11, 11.2 [on the Stimpmeter], something like that. And I really don't think they need to get much faster,” McIlroy, the reigning two-time Masters champion, said. “I think if they can keep them at that speed, they can get them firm, and they can use the hole locations that they want to use without having some of the struggles that they have had the last couple of U.S. Opens. So to me, it's all about them just maintaining the green speeds and not getting them too out of hand, and I think it will be a great week. If it's set up the right way, I think it's one of the best championship tests in the country. I mean, it's an amazing golf course.”