Medinah Grew Wider, Decisions Grew Costlier: The Off-the-Tee Line Problem

The pointing happened at the edge of the tee, nearly 400 metres from the green. The caddie raised his left hand and pointed at a patch of grass that looked like nothing — no bunker, no tree root, no yardage marker. The player nodded, swapped clubs, and the group settled on a target within about four seconds. Nobody in the gallery behind them realised the most important decision of the hole had already been made before the club ever moved.

I once wrote 2,000 words about tactics, then realised a single pointing hand told more. After enough hours on the practice grounds of Busan, I understood that most of a tour professional's preparation is not spent hitting balls but choosing a stance and choosing a line. Every round is a drumbeat; I am only the one keeping time between two grandstands — and the rhythm of a hole begins long before the tee shot.

Context: a course handed back its width

Medinah Country Club, Course 3, sits on the outskirts of Chicago and is one of the heaviest names in American golf. It has hosted the 2026 and 2026 US Opens, the 2026 and 2026 PGA Championships, the 2026 Ryder Cup — where Europe came back from 10-6 down to win 14.5-13.5 in what is remembered as the "Miracle at Medinah" — and the 2026 BMW Championship, where Justin Thomas beat Patrick Cantlay in a playoff. Players leave, but the seat they sat in keeps its shape in memory. In 2026 the course will host the Presidents Cup again.

The name that interests me more, though, sits on the renovation drawings: OCM Golf, the design group of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Clayton, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead. Their direction was not to make the course harder by adding water and sand, but to restore width that once existed — removing tree lines, reopening playing corridors, and bringing back tee-shot choices that decades of "narrow it for safety" had erased.

This is the most misunderstood point when viewed from outside. A wide course is not a forgiving course. Width only changes the type of pressure a player carries: from pressure of execution to pressure of judgement. And in a sport where 72 holes can be decided by three shots aimed the wrong way, the second kind of pressure is far more uncomfortable.

Core: from "hit the fairway" to "choose the right line"

For decades, the tee shot was summarised in one statistic: fairways hit. That number carries a fundamental flaw — it treats every fairway as equal and every miss as equal. A ball sitting on the edge of the rough, 120 metres from the pin on a perfect angle, is often better than a ball in the middle of the fairway but 200 metres out, blocked by a tree or forced to carry a bunker. The stat sheet cannot say that.

The core of the problem is this: the quality of a tee shot must be measured by the quality of the next shot, not by where the ball stops. This is the logic strokes gained off the tee was built to capture: it adds distance gained to a positional adjustment based on where the ball finishes. A drive into the rough from an open angle can still return positive value, while a drive in the fairway from a dead angle can return negative value. Fairway percentage cannot tell those two apart. Strokes gained can.

At Medinah after the renovation, the story becomes clearer because width creates genuinely different routes. Take a par 4 with a left bunker around 280 metres: the aggressive line over the bunker leaves a wedge of about 100 metres but demands precise carry and accepts the risk of sand. The safe line sends the ball to the wide right side, leaving about 170 metres but from a fully open angle with nothing to carry. Two routes, two entirely different problems, and neither is automatically correct.

To pick a route, a tour professional needs four pieces of data the gallery almost never sees. The first is carry distance — the real flying distance of each club in that day's temperature and altitude, not the number on the spec sheet. The second is dispersion pattern — the shape of the shot's distribution zone, not a single average landing point. The third is distance to trouble — the measured gap from the expected landing area to the bunker edge, water edge or rough edge, in metres rather than in feel. The fourth is club consistency — the true reliability of each club across weeks, because a club can fly beautifully in practice and go missing on the third day of competition.

Im Sung-jae has been known for years for a high fairway percentage and low dispersion. His edge is not power but the fact that he knows exactly how wide his dispersion zone is and picks routes that fit inside it. On a wide course like Medinah, that kind of self-knowledge converts into score faster than any long drive.

The counter-intuitive angle: width does not remove difficulty, it moves it

The first reaction from fans when they hear a course is being de-treed and widened is usually: it will play easier, scores will drop. In practice, courses renovated in this school move the opposite way in one very specific respect — more options available means more ways to be wrong.

A narrow fairway asks the player one question only: how do I get the ball in there. A wide fairway asks three or four at once, and none has an obvious answer. On the tee, a player is no longer judged by whether he found the short grass but by whether he chose the right route — a criterion that cannot be checked by eye and cannot be repaired once the ball is gone.

There is also a technical consequence rarely mentioned: removing trees also removes aiming references. Many tour professionals aim off a canopy, a pylon or the edge of a distant roofline. When those disappear, they have to rebuild their reference system from scratch — and in a tournament week, the time to do that is very short. Width grants tactical freedom but takes away visual comfort.

Data tells us where we stand; emotion tells us why we stay. On a wide course, what keeps a player upright is not the yardage book but confidence in his own dispersion zone.

In youth golf, I still often see coaches teaching students to hit it far before teaching them to read a line. When a young player walks onto a wide course like Medinah without ever having been taught route selection, he stands on the tee longer, hesitates more, and eventually pulls the strongest club as a way of avoiding the decision. That is the clearest symptom of an abandoned technical foundation.

What to watch next

For Medinah and the 2026 Presidents Cup, what I will record is not the leaderboard but the driver usage rate on the same hole across four rounds. If that number shifts sharply between Friday and Sunday, conditions have forced players to rewrite the plan mid-tournament — and that is a more valuable tactical signal than any standings table.

I will also watch the length of the caddie-player conversation on the tee. On a narrow course, that conversation is short. On a wide course with multiple routes, it stretches, sometimes to the point where a referee intervenes. The duration of that talk is the most honest gauge of how complex a course really is.

At Medinah in 2026, what is worth watching will not be in the fairway column. It will be in the caddie's hand, raised about four seconds before the club comes down.