By Nate Oxman
While the golf world is fawning over the majesty of Donald Ross’s self-proclaimed “masterpiece” at Aronimink Golf Club in the suburbs of Philadelphia as it readies to host the PGA Championship next week, another Donald Ross standout about two hours north in West Caldwell, N.J. will take the stage as the opening act.
Mountain Ridge Country Club, host of this week’s Mizuho Americas Open on the LPGA Tour, opened not long after Aronimink unveiled its Donald Ross design in 1928. While Aronimink is lauded as one of the top golf courses in golf-rich Philadelphia, Mountain Ridge is often overshadowed among the throngs of highly ranked courses in the New York metropolitan area.
With the likes of Shinnecock Hills, set to host the U.S. Open in June, Bethpage Black, most recently the site of last year’s Ryder Cup, and dozens of other courses dominating the top 100 rankings of all major golf publications and news outlets, it’s understandable Mountain Ridge may not have national notoriety.
That doesn’t make it right.
A Club with a Deep History
Mountain Ridge Country Club dates back to 1912, when a pair of Newark, N.J. businessmen were unable to obtain access to established private clubs in the area due to their Jewish religion. The club recruited heads of other prominent Newark Jewish families, purchased land adjacent to Essex County Country Club in West Orange, N.J., and hired that club’s pro, Robert Hunter, to craft a 9-hole course.
A.W. Tillinghast expanded that to a full 18, and Herbert Strong did a little tweaking in the 1920s too, before the club realized the property, severely sloped in certain spots, might not be the best location for the long-term success of the club.
Mountain Ridge’s leaders were intelligent enough to seek input from other prominent golf course architects at the time: Walter Travis, Seth Raynor, and Charles Banks. All three concluded that the club needed a new home, which it quickly found a little farther north in West Caldwell — and thus, a new designer.
Enter the great Donald Ross.
Donald Ross Arrives at Mountain Ridge
While Ross, a direct disciple of Old Tom Morris, was born in Scotland, he made a massive impact on American golf, crafting highly acclaimed courses like Pinehurst No. 2, Essex County Club, East Lake, Oakland Hills, Oak Hill, and Inverness.
His success at all of those sites made it possible for Ross to continue to do what he did best when he arrived at Mountain Ridge: carefully and creatively route a golf course to present a continuous variety of challenges, both as players venture from tee to green and then as they navigate the short grass with putter in hand.
And that’s exactly what Ross did at Mountain Ridge, which hosted its first big national tournament in the U.S. Senior Amateur in 2012.
It was around that time that the well-traveled Ron Prichard, a golf course architect later dubbed the “father of restoration,” finished his work at the club. His work included expanding the greens back to Ross’s specifications, widening fairways, building new back tees, adjusting the appearance and placement of bunkers that had gradually changed over time, and removing unnecessary trees.
The result was applauded throughout the golf course architecture world and helped Mountain Ridge attract the LPGA, which staged the Cognizant Founders Cup there in 2021. The club is now in its first year of a two-year period serving as host of the Mizuho Americas Open, a unique event hosted by Michelle Wie West that features both LPGA Tour and AJGA players competing side by side in separate competitions.
Tickets can be purchased by visiting mizuhoamericasopen.com/tickets. Golf Channel will have coverage of all four rounds.
A Gorgeous Parkland Stage
The defending champion is Jenno Thitikul, who played her final 27 holes last year at Liberty National Golf Club bogey free. While players and spectators at Liberty National enjoyed jaw-dropping views of the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline, Mountain Ridge offers everyone on site a glimpse at a great golf course in a gorgeous parkland setting.
“Obviously, the routing is pretty outstanding. I mean, that’s easy to give you that kind of an answer, but that’s true in every case for a Ross course. I don’t think I’ve ever found a Ross course I worked on where I felt like I would reroute it. I just felt like what he had done was a perfectly balanced golf course.”
— Ron Prichard
Prichard, who began pushing for restoration of classic American golf courses way back in the 1980s, did wonderful work at Mountain Ridge — perhaps most notably on a set of greens considered superb by both he and Dr. Bradley Klein, a golf course architecture design consultant and Donald Ross expert.
“It’s a fantastic set of greens. It’s very bold, very dramatic. Muscular. It’s in the top ten of all green sets he ever built.”
— Dr. Bradley Klein
“I think that the greens at Mountain Ridge may be easily in the top five Ross courses that I’ve ever seen.”
— Ron Prichard
That’s incredibly high — yet justifiable — praise considering Ross penned nearly 400 golf courses.
Greens Worth Studying
While all 18 green complexes wholeheartedly deserve recognition, the first of the elite is found right at the conclusion of the opening hole, a mid-length par 4 that plays downhill from a tee just below Mountain Ridge’s magnificent clubhouse.
Spectators at this week’s tournament should certainly spend some time by this green, studying how it accepts — and also deflects — different types of approach shots.
Another sensational putting surface sits atop a little rise at the end of the first one-shotter at the fourth hole, which can stretch as far back as 209 yards. Both vertical and horizontal spines and some dramatic tilts create a plethora of pin-placement options. Make it a point to spend some time studying this one.
Two more terrific greens are found at the sixth, a beautiful par 5 that could certainly put some players who attempt to reach the green in two in more than a few precarious positions, and the uphill par-3 seventh, which will undoubtedly wreak havoc on those who miss the green with their tee shot.
Don’t worry. There are plenty more greens to drool over on the back nine.
The Strategy of Ross’s Bunkering
Let’s return to the aforementioned seventh hole, which sits in the southeast corner of the property and features another fun Ross design element: a coffin bunker that both shields the player’s view of the green’s false front and snatches low-trajectory shots.
Another such bunker precedes the fairway at the short and fun 359-yard par-4 12th, an ever-so-gentle dogleg right guarded by a narrow creek on its right side.
Klein commented on these hazards that Ross used at different times throughout his impressive career.
“So that’s a different approach to bunkering than what prevailed in the entire post-World War II era. And a lot of these short carry bunkers or intruding lines of play became considered obsolete and they were removed. And I think that that’s a shame. But a lot of those now are being restored. So what you see at Mountain Ridge, for example, is fairway bunkering that comes across partially the line of play and you have to deal with it rather than just play down the middle blindly.”
— Dr. Bradley Klein
One of Prichard’s areas of focus for his work at Mountain Ridge included rebuilding and reshaping the course’s fairway bunkers to sit more perpendicular to the line of play, as Ross intended them to be.
“Very few people understand that the axis of Ross’s bunkering was normally perpendicular. Sometimes they were placed at a slight angle, occasionally you have a linear bunker that ran parallel with the line of play. But normally that was just the kind of a bunker that was almost always placed in a position to catch balls and try to keep them from going off the golf course.”
— Ron Prichard
Prichard noted that Ross intended these bunkers, many of which feature a steep wall of grass on the far side, to prevent players from being able to play to the green.
Notable examples at Mountain Ridge can be found at the first, third, ninth, 15th, and 18th holes.
An Underrated Ross Gem Gets Its Moment
The finishing hole, a beautiful uphill, dogleg-left par 4, is also often played with small planes taking off from the adjacent Essex County Airport. It’s a quaint feature that adds to Mountain Ridge’s endless charm.
“It’s a beautiful piece of land. It’s very ideal, rolling, in terms of the terrain. There isn’t a lot of steepness, but there’s always enough contour under foot. And then the greens really have been much expanded over the years, and are just fantastic.”
— Dr. Bradley Klein
When young athletes accomplish something amazing and are quickly plucked from their local community and plopped onto the world stage, the expectations are understandably enormous. How could they not be?
Here’s an example. A 10-year-old girl from Hawaii qualifies for the 2000 U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links and then shoots 74-76 to advance to match play. She makes it to the third round the next year, then the semifinals the next, until she knocks out all adversaries to win the darn thing in 2003 and become the youngest champion in the history of the USGA at age 13.
Oh, and just a month earlier, she took advantage of a sponsor exemption and shot 66 on moving day at the LPGA Tour’s Kraft Nabisco Championship to move into the final group of the day on Sunday. In a major championship. At 13 years old. When her eighth grade classmates were on spring break. Wow!
Seven months later, she shot a second-round 68 at the Sony Open. On the PGA Tour. Double wow!
And although she missed the cut by a shot, she beat some big names that week: Scott Hoch, Craig Stadler, Adam Scott, John Cook, and Zach Johnson. And many more.
So by the time she became a teenager, it’s natural that the expectations for Michelle Wie West were wild. As previously posed, how could they not be after all she’d done at such a young age?
But all too often a player, no matter the skill, no matter the sport, heck no matter the profession (child actors?), the dramatic rise levels off. For whatever reason, it just does. For all but a very, very, very select few anyway.
But Wie West was still on her ascent at this point in time. She turned pro in the fall of 2005 at age 16, and had a strong rookie season in 2006, recording three top-five finishes in major championships. Three!
And then came a bit of a backtrack. Wie West struggled to keep the momentum she’d built as a rising star through 2008.
Then, she won the limited-field Lorena Ochoa Invitational in 2009, and she won again at the Canadian Women’s Open in 2010 before various long-term injuries led to another slide.
But Wie West is a fighter and she climbed back to the top in emphatic fashion at the start of 2014 with a T2 at the first major of the season at the Chevron Championship (nee Kraft Nabisco) down in Houston, followed by a win two weeks later at the LOTTE Championship, then four top-10s in a five-week stretch before a dramatic culmination and crowning achievement at the U.S. Women’s Open at the famed Pinehurst No. 2.
Wie West was a major champion, 14 lightspeed years after teeing it up in her first big event at 10 years old. And while she only won once more, at the HSBC Women’s World Championship in 2018, she has undoubtedly won in life. Apologies if that sounds cheesy, but watch and listen as she talks about her family and her position in the game and it’s easy to see it’s true.
Wie West gained major sponsorships after turning professional, most notably from Nike and Sony, conducted herself with grace and poise at all times while representing those worldwide brands, and was inarguably worth every penny. She did things the right way, even when skeptics squawked about her playing in too many men’s events, and naysayers knocked her for failing to meet expectations on the golf course.
Wie West didn’t win 10 majors or 20 tour events. Those are facts. But she served as a wonderful ambassador for the game of golf throughout her career. And even after she married Jonnie West, son of NBA legend Jerry West, in 2019 and became a mother in 2020, Wie West recognized that while her full-time playing career had more or less come to a close, she could still use her clout and charisma to continue to advance the game.
She joined Mizuho, a powerful worldwide financial institution, to spearhead a new LPGA Tour event in 2023 that features LPGA Tour players and the AJGA’s best competing simultaneously for separate trophies.
“The genesis of this event really came from my history of being a junior golfer and kind of my trajectory,” she said. “We wanted to create a space for juniors to experience being a pro for one week, playing with the best of the best, having the juniors compare their golf game to the pros that they’re playing with on the weekend.”
Add in an iconic venue in Liberty National Golf Club with jaw-dropping views of both the Statue of Liberty and the New York City skyline and success was sure to come. And it did.
Decorated amateur player Rose Zhang won the inaugural event in her professional debut, in a sudden-death playoff no less. Yana Wilson, the 2022 U.S. Girls’ Junior champ, won the AJGA event that first year. Wilson, an LPGA Tour rookie in 2026, will be in this year’s field.
Nelly Korda followed Zhang in 2024, and Gianna Clemente, another talented and decorated junior, won the AJGA amateur event. Atthaya Thitikul took last year’s Mizuho Americas Open win and turned it into a trifecta of season-ending awards: player of the year, leading money winner and Vare Trophy champ for lowest scoring average.
Wie West, who has served as tournament host each year, made the first of what are sure to be many headlines surrounding the event Tuesday when she revealed that she has accepted a sponsor exemption to compete this year and serve as playing host.
“One of the privileges that comes with being the host of the Mizuho Americas Open is that I, along with Mizuho and the tournament team, review the potential golfers that could fulfill our sponsor exemptions that we add to our field,” said Wie West.
“When I was presented with the idea for me to play, I couldn’t think of a better time to return to the course and compete with the world’s best golfers, as well as have the opportunity to play alongside the top AJGA (American Junior Golf Association) girls.”
Wie West will also compete in this year’s U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera Country Club.
The Mizuho Americas Open is scheduled for May 7-10 at Mountain Ridge Country Club in West Caldwell, N.J., roughly 20 miles west of New York City. The historic club features a dramatic Donald-Ross designed golf course highlighted by expansive, intriguing greens and a great mix of short and long holes. Mountain Ridge C.C. will host the tournament again in 2027 before the event heads back to Liberty National G.C. in 2028.
Tickets are available at www.
The first three rounds of the Mizuho Americas Open will be featured on Golf Channel and the final round will be televised on CBS. More information is available at MizuhoAmericasOpen.
The Mizuho Americas Open is a purpose-driven tournament on the LPGA Tour. As title sponsor, Mizuho Americas created and drove the vision for a distinctive and premium event that celebrates women and advances the next generation, with a charitable focus on providing leadership and life skills to young girls from low-income communities.
“I think it’s really inspiring to be around other women who are driven, who work hard … it’s one thing to watch your idols on T.V., it’s another thing to watch them in person, but it’s a whole other thing to be inside the ropes with them, competing alongside them. From the young ladies who come to the [Mizuho] DrivHer Summit, there’s a lot of talk about leadership, taking control of what you can do, putting in the work. We talk a lot about work ethic and believing in yourself, networking, asking the right questions, and this is why the mentorship program is so special this week for the juniors and the pros. We want to make that connection.”
“We just really want this week to be a week of mentorship,” Wie West later added. “a week where juniors really throw themselves into the process and just learn a lot. I want them to soak as much up as they can over the week.”
