Hazeltine National Golf Club
Designed by Robert Trent Jones
History
In the years following the Second World War, Minnesota’s golf establishment found itself without a championship-caliber stage of its own — a gap in the state’s sporting geography that a group of Minneapolis businessmen set out to close. Their answer was Hazeltine National Golf Club, founded in 1962 with an ambition written into its charter from the start: to build a course capable of hosting the game’s biggest events, and to bring major championship golf to the upper Midwest for good.
The club turned to Robert Trent Jones, then at the height of his influence and already known for reshaping American golf architecture to accommodate the power and precision of the modern professional game. Working the rolling farmland and lake country outside Chaska, Jones laid out a course built with the U.S. Open explicitly in mind, designing long, demanding par-4s and exacting driving corridors meant to test the best players in the world rather than accommodate the everyday member. It was, from its opening day, a course built for championships first.
That ambition was rewarded and complicated in equal measure. Hazeltine hosted the 1970 U.S. Open, an event that drew sharp criticism from players — Dave Hill’s remark that the course lacked only “80 acres of corn and a few cows” became part of golf lore — and prompted the club to bring in architect Perry Maxwell’s contemporaries and later Rees Jones, Robert Trent Jones’s son, for a series of revisions through the 1970s and 1980s that softened some of the course’s rougher edges while preserving its teeth. The changes paid off: Hazeltine went on to host the 1991 U.S. Open, won by Payne Stewart, the 2002 PGA Championship, the 2009 PGA Championship, and the 2016 Ryder Cup, cementing its place as one of the few American clubs to have staged all of the game’s premier events on American soil.
Playing Notes
Expect wind to be the deciding factor here — Hazeltine sits open enough across much of its acreage that Minnesota's prevailing gusts get a real say in club selection, especially on approach shots into greens that don't offer much bailout room. Water comes into play at several points and demands a clear decision off the tee rather than a hopeful swing, while the bunkering is deep enough that recovery shots often cost a full stroke, not just a scare. Walking is possible but this is a course where most groups take carts given the distances between greens and tees. Ball-striking accuracy matters more than sheer length, and the greens run fast and slick enough that lag putting deserves practice before you ever reach the first tee. Bring extra balls for the water holes, sunscreen and layered clothing for wind that can shift through the round, and a game plan that favors position over aggression on the approach.