The BMW Championship starts tomorrow at the famed Cog Hill Country Club in Lemont, Illinois... but players will be faced with a new challenge on an old track.

Rees Jones, heralded as one of the best golf course architects in the world, has used his artistic eye to add a few new twists and turns in the Dubsdread course, and early indications suggest that the changes have been astounding.

As Taylor Anderson writes, while the changes may have been routine for an older course, they were also very much needed:

"There will be a pond at the dogleg on the par-4 seventh hole, perhaps a stream guarding the par-4 eighth green and the 18th green will be moved closer to the pond. The results will still look like Dubsdread but a 21st Century version.…The finished product will be a par-70, with the fifth and 15th holes reworked as par-4s, at slightly more than the 7,326 yards it currently plays for the PGA Tour players" (2007).

Eliminating two par 5's on the course should mean higher scores for a course that is hoping to host a US Open within the next few years. Lower-par layouts seems to be a continuing trend for championship courses as more and more are looking for new ways to challenge the sport's elite players on the grandest of stages.

Source:

http://www.earthgolf.com/2007/05/11/rees-jones-and-cog-hill/