Whistling Straits Country Club, Straits Course

Whistling Straits Country Club is a 36-hole public golf facility located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The facility has two championship 18-hole golf courses. They are, The Straits Course and The Irish Course.

Whistling Straits Country Club, The Straits Course opened in 1997. The course was designed by Pete Dye.

The Straits Course is the flagship course at Whistling Straits. It has a length of 7,514 yards and a par of 72. Set along a two-mile stretch of Lake Michigan, the course features vast rolling greens, deep pot bunkers, grass-topped dunes and winds that sweep in off the lake.

#17, 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 Straits Course duplicates British and Irish links layouts, its original state however, was not linksland. The original landscape of the Straits Course reguired movement and redistribution of 800,000 cubic yards of dirt and sand, all of it remaining on-site with none brought in from outside sources.

The Straits Course hosted:

The 2004 PGA Championship won by Vijay Singh in a playoff over Chris DiMarco and Justin Leonard.

The 2007 U.S. Senior Open won by Brad Bryant, and the 2010 PGA Championship won by Martin Kaymer in a playoff over Bubba Watson.

The 2010 PGA Championship won by Martin Kaymer in a three-hole playoff, his first major championship. Liang Wen-Chong set the course record for the Straits Course with a 64 in the third round of the 2010 PGA Championship.

The 2010 PGA Championship was the site of the Dustin Johnson controversy. Johnson, who was leading the tournament at the time, hit his drive deep into the gallery to the right of the fairway. His ball came to rest in the sand, and he proceeded to complete the hole in bogey to drop into a tie with Martin Kaymer and Bubba Watson. However as he left the 18th green, an official informed him that he may have been guilty of a rules infraction while playing his second shot on the 18th hole. It was determined that Johnson's ball had been in a bunker and he had grounded his club, an offence which attracts a 2-stroke penalty. As a result, he fell out of the playoff and into a tie for 5th place. The bunker lay outside of the gallery ropes in an area where the crowd had been walking, Johnson had not realized that the sandy area where his ball lay was in fact a bunker. Prior to the tournament, the Rules Committee had notified all competitors and posted statements throughout the clubhouse locker room, informing the players of a local rule that declared that all sandy areas, regardless of their location and condition, were to be considered bunkers (hazards).