- Perhaps If Hogan Hadn’t Called It A “Monster…”:  Let me first say that despite having written about it for the upcoming World Atlas of Golf, I have never been to Oakland Hills.  Further, before being too critical of it, I must also note that the famed South course’s back nine is rated among America’s very best by no less a traditionalist than the esteemed designer Tom Doak – so clearly, this cannot be too bad a golf course.  However…  Oakland Hills also holds a notable place in the evolution of golf course design, particularly after being christened a “monster” by Ben Hogan following his victory in the 1951 U.S. Open – the first Major played here following a now-famous 1950 renovation of Donald Ross’s original design by Robert Trent Jones.  Trent’s work largely amounted simply to pinching virtually every driving area with multiple fairway bunkers, an approach entirely antithetical to Ross’s but one which has kept the layout tournament-relevant into the new millennium.  Well, not quite.  With unchecked technology continuing to eat away at the layout’s well-documented bite, the decision was made in 2005 to hire Trent’s son Rees for another modernization, and here things get even more interesting.  For Rees Jones has, to my mind, become golf design’s poster boy for the argument that one really can go a long way in life with a firm handshake and a nice smile – and approach which seems to really set one up well in a field that has long been a refuge for snake oil salesmen anyway.  At Oakland Hills, as with other high-profile “Rees-storations,” the decidedly mundane steps of simply adding new tees (several misaligned, according to reports) and flanking every possible fairway edge with sand were, predictably, Rees’s M.O.  And then there was the alteration of the 16th green, whose back-right section now extends further into the famously adjacent pond.  Doak has called this well-known test “just a water hole,” and perhaps it was a bit overrated to begin with, but as Dr. Brad Klein recently opined in Golfweek, “the idea of hanging the back right of the famed 16th green out over the water befits a second-tier TPC, not a classic course like this.”  Of course, the blame for all of these problems might well be laid at Ben Hogan’s feet, because prior to that 1951 Open, Oakland Hills enjoyed a reputation – at least somewhat based on Donald Ross’s own comments – as a strategically excellent, lay-of-the-land design.  Once Hogan attached the Monster moniker, however, an entirely new image seems to have been embraced, leaving Oakland Hills – like so many other postwar Major championship sites – to focus exclusively on toughness.  In that context, perhaps Rees Jones really was the perfect guy to modernize things, because by simply adding bunkers (no matter how poorly shaped) in all the places where there weren’t any, things likely have become more difficult.  But as Dr. Klein succinctly observed in Golfweek, “Tighter, longer, tougher. It’s not a very imaginative formula for upgrading a golf course.”