The Story
The land came first. Thirty-five miles northwest of Milwaukee, Ice Age glaciers left behind the Kettle Moraine — a heaved, tumbling landscape of ridges and hollows that looked, to anyone who had seen the linksland of Scotland or Ireland, uncannily like golf waiting to happen. In the early 2000s a Delafield greeting-card entrepreneur named Bob Lang bought the farmland in the town of Erin and set out to build not just a course but a U.S. Open site, handing the design to Michael Hurdzan, Dana Fry, and Ron Whitten — the last of whom was better known as Golf Digest's longtime architecture editor, here designing the kind of course he had spent a career writing about.
The trio's answer to the property was restraint. They moved remarkably little earth, letting fairways ride the glacial contours and framing everything in waving fescue. Erin Hills opened in 2006, and the USGA came calling almost immediately: the U.S. Amateur arrived in 2011, and in 2017 the course landed the U.S. Open itself — the first ever played in Wisconsin, and only the eighth on a course that anybody could simply call and play.
That Open week belonged to Brooks Koepka, who overpowered the big property to finish 16 under par — matching the U.S. Open's 72-hole record in relation to par — and claim the first of his majors. The USGA liked what it saw. The Mid-Amateur followed in 2022, the U.S. Women's Open in 2025, and a slate of future national championships is already promised to the town of Erin.
Through all of it, Erin Hills has held to one old-fashioned conviction: you walk. There are no cart paths carving up the moraine — just players and caddies moving across an enormous, wind-brushed landscape, with the spires of Holy Hill's basilica standing watch on the horizon. It is young by the standards of great courses, and it plays like it has been there since the glaciers left.