Golf Digest Names Victoria National Among Their Top 9 U.S. Open Course Candidates
By Ryan Herrington • golfdigest.com • June 8, 2024
The U.S. Open is the annual national championship of men’s golf in the United States, the third of four men's major golf championships, and part of the PGA Tour and European Tour schedules. One can imagine the beauty and caliber required of host courses, which are thoughtfully decided upon by the USGA (United States Golf Association) years in advance.
While the next available date for a course to host a U.S. Open isn't until 2043, Dormie Network’s Victoria National in Newburgh, Indiana has earned a spot on Golf Digest's list of top 9 worthy contenders.
Built atop Peabody Coal Company’s long-abandoned Victoria strip mine in southern Indiana, Victoria National was a simple routing for Tom Fazio. He just followed the corridors (the perfect width for fairways) that existed between mining spoil mounds (long since overgrown with trees) and some 40 acres of fingery lagoons that had formed as steam shovels carving out coal deposits hit the water table. Chosen as Best New Private Course of 1999, Victoria National stunned most Golf Digest panelists. One gushed it was, “the most unusual, unpolished and unpretentious Fazio design ever.” Another called it, “probably the hardest Fazio course I’ve played. More penal than Pine Valley.” Fazio concurred with that assessment. “It’s U.S. Open-quality now,” he said soon after it opened. “If the wind blew, it’d be too hard.” Indeed, the USGA could make this course incredibly tough if it wanted to. The bigger question is whether it's in a place that would attract enough fans.
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