- Italian-born writer on golf course architecture Tancredi Marchiolo launches a series of essays examining the restored Medinah layout, the Bendelow-to-Ogilvy lineage, and what the September team event reveals about classic design
Medinah, Illinois, Sep 10, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — Golf writer and course architecture enthusiast Tancredi Marchiolo has announced a new series of essays timed to the 2026 Presidents Cup, which brings the biennial competition between the United States and the International Team to Medinah Country Club’s Course No. 3 from September 22 through 27. The series will look past the leaderboard to the ground itself, tracing how a 1920s Tom Bendelow design became one of the most heavily reworked championship courses in America, and what its latest transformation says about the direction of modern golf architecture.
Medinah’s Course No. 3 arrives at the Presidents Cup fresh from a full-scale redesign by OCM, the Australian firm co-founded by International Team captain Geoff Ogilvy. The project rerouted the closing holes, removed thousands of trees, widened fairways, enlarged greens, and introduced broad expanses of fescue in place of the dense parkland corridors that defined the course during its three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, and the 2012 Ryder Cup. For Tancredi Marchiolo, that shift is the story of the week.
“Medinah is a fascinating case because it has never stopped being rebuilt,” said Tancredi Marchiolo. “Bendelow laid it out across rolling Illinois farmland, and for a century afterward committees kept adding trees, narrowing corridors, and asking the course to play harder. What OCM has done is turn the clock back toward the original idea of width, angles, and options. Whether that produces better match play is exactly the question I want to sit with over four days.”
The essays will examine several threads that run through the writer’s broader work on the game. The first considers the tension between a course built to punish and a course built to reward thinking, a distinction Tancredi Marchiolo has long argued in favor of the Scottish links tradition. The second explores tree removal as the defining restoration movement of the past two decades and asks what is gained and lost when a parkland course is opened to the sky. A third piece looks at the peculiar relationship between architects and captains, given that Ogilvy will lead the International side across holes his own firm reshaped. Later entries will draw comparisons between Medinah and the courses on the writer’s own list of essential walks, including Muirfield, Royal Dornoch, and Circolo Golf Villa d’Este above Lake Como in his native Italy.
Tancredi Marchiolo came to golf later than to his other lifelong pursuits, taking up the game in his thirties and finding in it the same qualities he values in opera and wine: patience, attention to setting, and a refusal to be hurried. He plays for the walk as much as for the score and prefers courses laid out across natural terrain to engineered modern designs. His writing on golf leans reflective rather than technical, with a particular focus on the history of the game and the architects who shaped it.
“The Presidents Cup will be decided by putts and pairings, and I follow that with real interest,” Tancredi Marchiolo added. “But the part of the week that will still matter in twenty years is the course. If Medinah proves that a great old parkland layout can be restored rather than simply toughened, it will influence how a lot of clubs think about their own ground. That is worth writing about carefully.”
The series will be published on TancrediMarchiolo.com, with the first essay appearing ahead of the opening four-ball session on Thursday, September 24, and further installments following each day of competition. Additional writing on golf, opera, and wine is available across the author’s personal platforms.
About Tancredi Marchiolo
Tancredi Marchiolo is an Italian-born writer and devoted student of three classical pursuits: opera, wine, and golf. His writing on golf focuses on course architecture, the walking game, and the landscapes that give the great courses their character, with the links of Scotland and the historic courses of Italy forming the backbone of his own record-keeping. Beyond the course, he writes on the Italian operatic canon and the bel canto repertoire, and on the wines of Piedmont and Tuscany, reflecting a broader interest in tradition, craftsmanship, and place. Learn more at TancrediMarchiolo.com.
