The U.S. against the rest of the world.
Presidents Cup week at Medinah.

Medinah sits about 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, a 1920s club with one of the most photographed clubhouses in golf and three courses on the property. No. 3 is the famous one. Tom Bendelow laid it out in 1928, and it has hosted three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, the 2012 Ryder Cup and the 2019 BMW Championship. For most of that run it was the classic Chicago parkland test: long, narrow, tree-lined, and tough.

That course is gone. Between 2022 and 2024 the club handed No. 3 to OCM, the Australian design firm of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead, and they rebuilt it from the ground up: hundreds of trees out, fairways widened into real strategic zones, greens made bigger and wilder, bunkers rebuilt at Golden Age scale with islands of long grass in them. The idea was to bring back the width and character of the 1928 original, and the result plays like an Australian sandbelt course dropped into the Illinois suburbs. Lake Kadijah still runs through the middle of the property, but instead of three par 3s firing straight across it, the water now comes at you from different angles, including a tee shot on the 12th that plays diagonally over it. For this week it's set up as a par 72 at 7,564 yards, and the routing has been shuffled so the members' 5th hole opens each match and the normal 16th through 18th play as the 11th through 13th, which puts the drama where the matches actually get decided.

• The International captain designed the golf course. Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion, runs OCM, the firm that rebuilt No. 3. So the visiting captain knows every bunker on the home team's course better than the home team does. Brandt Snedeker captains the U.S. side, and the week opens Thursday with five four-ball matches.
• This is where the Miracle at Medinah happened. At the 2012 Ryder Cup, Europe trailed 10–6 going into the Sunday singles and won 14½–13½. Medinah and Muirfield Village are the only two American courses to host both the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup.
• Tiger Woods won both PGA Championships here: 1999, when a 19-year-old Sergio Garcia chased him down the stretch and hit that eyes-closed shot from behind a tree, and again in 2006.
• The U.S. leads the series 13–1–1, and the International Team's only win came in 1998 at Royal Melbourne. The Internationals are playing under a shield logo they adopted in 2019, and this year's team comes from seven countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea. Adam Scott, 46, is playing in his twelfth.
• Two U.S. rookies, Jacob Bridgeman and Jackson Koivun, are the first players ever to go from the Junior Presidents Cup to the real thing. Koivun is 21 and won the 3M Open in his third start as a pro. Bridgeman shot 61 on Sunday to win in Asheville. More on that below.

Jacob Bridgeman won the first Biltmore Championship Asheville on Sunday, and he did it the hard way. Five shots back starting the final round at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, he shot a career-best 10-under 61, eight birdies and an eagle, to finish at 26-under 258 and win by two. Ben James also shot 61 and birdied four of his last six holes, and it still wasn't enough. Ricky Castillo and 54-hole leader Neal Shipley tied for third, and North Carolina's own J.T. Poston shot 60 to tie for fifth with Jackson Koivun.

It's Bridgeman's second win of the year, after the Genesis Invitational at Riviera in February, and it came about an hour from his hometown of Inman, South Carolina, in front of family and friends. He took home $900,000 of the $5 million purse, and now he flies to Chicago to make his Presidents Cup debut. Not a bad week.

The LPGA is back from its post-Solheim break with the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship presented by P&G, September 25–27 at Pinnacle Country Club in Rogers, Arkansas. It's the event's 20th anniversary: a $3 million purse, a 144-player field and 54 holes, on a Don Sechrest course from 1990 that Randy Heckenkemper redid in 2009. Jasmine Suwannapura is the defending champion from 2024, when she won at 17 under, because last year's edition was washed out by storms and never became official. Charley Hull, Miyu Yamashita and Lottie Woad headline the field, with Woad fresh off her Solheim Cup point for Europe. Golf Channel has it Friday morning, Saturday 3–6 PM and Sunday 1–4 PM, all Central.

All times Central. Golf Channel also runs Live From the Presidents Cup every evening this week, and the LPGA event in Arkansas is on Golf Channel Friday through Sunday. If the windows shift, check your listings, or just swing by the clubhouse and we'll have it on the lounge screen.