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Whistling Straits

Whistling Straits is one of two golfing destinations associated with The American Club, a luxury resort located in nearby Kohler, Wisconsin, and owned by a subsidiary of the Kohler Company. The other course is Blackwolf Run. The Whistling Straits complex is located in the unincorporated Sheboygan County community of Haven in the Town of Mosel, north of the city of Sheboygan. Although the course is located in Haven, it officially has a Kohler postal address, and is mentioned within promotional materials as being in Kohler.

The two courses at Whistling Straits were designed by Pete & Alice Dye.

Straits Course

The Straits Course is the flagship course at Whistling Straits. It has a length of 7,514 yards and a par of 72. It hosted the 86th PGA Championship in August 2004, and was host to the 2007 U.S. Senior Open. In January 2005, the Straits Course was announced as the site for the PGA Championships in 2010 and 2015, as well as the 2020 Ryder Cup.

The Straits Course replicates the ancient seaside links courses of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Nestled along a two-mile (3 km) stretch of Lake Michigan, the course features vast rolling greens, deep pot bunkers, grass-topped dunes and winds that sweep in off the lake. At 7,514 yards, it is the second longest course to host a major.

The seventeenth named "Pinched Nerve", the unofficial signature hole, is the most difficult par-3 on the course. At 223 yards, with towering sand dunes and the lake to the left leaves golfers with no option but to go straight for the green.

The course also features two miles (3 km) of shoreline on Lake Michigan, eight holes hugging the lake, a flock of Scottish Blackface sheep, elevation changes of approximately and three stone bridges at holes 9, 10 and 18.

Although the Straits Course duplicates British and Irish links layouts, its original state was not linksland. Before the course was built, the property was a more or less featureless abandoned airfield called Camp Haven (1949-1959) , with a stream running through the middle. Its one saving grace, from a golf standpoint, was its two miles (3.2 km) of lake frontage. Kohler Company CEO Herbert Kohler signed up Dye as course architect, giving him a basically unlimited budget. During construction, the original landscape of the Straits Course alone was covered with about 800,000 cubic yards (610,000 m³) of dirt and sand. Until recently, the amount of earth moved would have been considered extreme for a golf course, but this amount has been dwarfed by that required by several other courses, most notably Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, where 25 million cubic yards (19.1 million m³) of earth were moved.

Irish Course

The second course at Whistling Straits, the Irish Course, is an inland grass-and-dune layout. It is an 18 hole course that features a 7,201 yards of golf from the longest tees on this par 72 course. The course rating is 75.6 while the slope rating is 146 on bent grass. Like the Straits course, it was designed by Pete Dye, and opened in 1998.

Having served as a PGA Championship host site, the Straits course has more notoriety. However, the editors of the noted independent golf travel newsletter, Golf Odyssey, view the Irish Course as much more difficult to play as it is trouble-filled with forced carries, gnarly rough, ponds, streams and ravines. that set the table.

Along with these obstacles, the Irish Course is laden with tremendous waste bunkers — tremendous in size and number — which are minimally maintained to let the elements shape and reshape them. The strength of the Irish course, along with its three sister courses, led Golf Odyssey to denote Kohler as "the best 72 holes of golf in the world".