A Closer Look at Oak Hill’s Illustrious Major Championship History, From the 1949 U.S. Amateur to the 2023 PGA Championship
The golf world is returning to visit an old friend next week. The PGA Championship will be held for the fourth time at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y., a 122-year-old Donald Ross classic that has seen a lot of big-time golf.
“One of the best in the world, with challenges that withstand the test of time,” says Jay Haas, and he would know having won the 2008 Senior PGA Championship there.
Oak Hill's big events date to 1949, when Charles Coe won the U.S. Amateur. Since then, the club has hosted every major men’s championship: U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, PGA, Senior U.S. Open and Senior PGA, plus a Ryder Cup. No other course can boast that.
Here’s a look at all of Oak Hill’s spotlight events:
1949 U.S. Amateur: Charles Coe defeated Rufus King 11 and 10 in the Amateur’s traditional 36-hole final. No one has won by such a lopsided margin since.
1956 U.S. Open: Cary Middlecoff, who gave up dentistry to play pro golf, won his third and final major by one stroke over former U.S. Open champions Ben Hogan and Julius Boros.
1968 U.S. Open: Lee Trevino's very first PGA Tour win was a major, equaling the scoring mark of 275 and becoming the first to record four rounds in the 60s. Jack Nicklaus was four shots back in second.
"Trevino was not long, but he was very straight," Haas says. "That was his coming out party."
1980 PGA Championship: Nicklaus's renaissance season at age 40 included a U.S. Open win and then his fifth PGA Championship. He was the only player under par (6 under) and won by seven over Andy Bean. He would have one more magical major in his career, the 1986 Masters.
1984 U.S. Senior Open: Miller Barber won three of the first six U.S. Senior Opens, with his second coming at Oak Hill by two shots over Arnold Palmer.
1989 U.S. Open: The last of Curtis Strange's 17 PGA Tour wins was a successful defense of his '88 U.S. Open title, becoming the first back-to-back winner since Ben Hogan in 1950-51. In the second round, four players (Jerry Pate, Nick Price, Doug Weaver, Mark Wiebe) aced the 167-yard 6th hole.
1995 Ryder Cup: Europe got its hands back on the cup for the first time since 1989 by one point, 14.5-13.5 for just its second win on U.S. soil. The U.S. led by two points going into Sunday singles and little-known Irishman Philip Walton defeated Jay Haas 1 up to secure the Cup. "My biggest disappointment," Haas says.
1998 U.S. Amateur: Prodigiously long-hitting Hank Kuehne, age 22, defeated 44-year-old Tom McKnight 2 and 1. Older brother Trip, who lost to Tiger Woods in the final of the 1994 U.S. Am, was his caddie.
2003 PGA Championship: Shaun Micheel became one of golf's most unlikely major champions with a two-shot win over Chad Campbell, secured by a kick-in birdie at the 72nd hole.
"The PGA has always been, for some reason, of the four majors the one a guy out of the blue can win," says Billy Andrade, who finished T10. "Mark Brooks, Rich Beem, Y.E. Yang ... one major, and it was a PGA."
2008 Senior PGA Championship: Haas had a better Oak Hill memory this year, winning albeit with an unusually high score: 7 over.
"The weather was predicted to not be great," he recalls. "Fifteen people withdrew before the event, they knew the course and said 'I'm not going up there and playing in that.' I wouldn't have missed it, I loved the course."
2013 PGA Championship: Jason Dufner shot a course-record 63 in the second round en route to a 10 under winning score (with bogeys on his last two holes), the lowest of all Oak Hill majors.
2019 Senior PGA Championship: In the most recent Oak Hill major before the 2023 PGA, Ken Tanigawa won at 3 under par to cap a wild weather week.
"There was a huge discrepancy in (first and second round) scores between late/early and early/late, the late/early wave got the brunt of a storm that came through early on the first day," says Andrade, who finished T8. "I think less than 10 players from my wave made the cut, I saw Kerry Haigh (chief championship officer for the PGA of America) at a restaurant that Saturday night, he said in all the years he'd never seen that big of a discrepancy of scores in waves."
Tanigawa saw Haas shortly before teeing off in the final round, and Haas said par would be his friend. Sure enough, an even-par final round was good enough for the win.