Medinah No. 3 opened in 1928 as a Tom Bendelow design, and for most of a century it was the place America went to get beaten up — three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, and the 2012 Ryder Cup where Europe erased a 10–6 deficit on Sunday. This week it adds the Presidents Cup, which completes the set.

Then the course broke. Justin Thomas won the 2019 BMW Championship there at 25 under, and by 2023 Golf Digest had it at No. 93 — a championship course that could no longer defend itself.

Here's the best storyline of the week: the firm hired to fix it was OCM — Ogilvy, Cocking and Mead. That Ogilvy is Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion and this week's International Team captain. The underdog captain redesigned the battlefield.

OCM pulled out hundreds of trees, widened the fairways, brought back Bendelow's bold bunkering and built five new holes — including a Cape-style 16th and a new par-3 17th that plays back across Lake Kadijah. None of the 24 players in the field has played it in competition since it reopened. Local knowledge sits with the guy in the International cart.

On paper this is a mismatch. The U.S. has won 10 straight and has never lost a Presidents Cup at home, and the Internationals have four rookies. The interesting question isn't who wins — it's whether Scottie Scheffler, the runaway world No. 1, can fix a 3-5-1 Presidents Cup record that includes 0-2 in singles.

The wild card is Jackson Koivun. Brandt Snedeker took the 21-year-old out of Auburn — a pro since June, 3M Open winner in his third start — over J.J. Spaun and Ben Griffin, and sent him out Thursday with Justin Thomas. He's the youngest American on a Presidents Cup team since Jordan Spieth in 2015.

The tactical note: weeks of rain left Medinah soft, so the setup crew is tucking pins to compensate — Thursday's hole on No. 2 sat 17 feet from the out-of-bounds fence. Soft greens favor aggression, and a split-rail fence punishes it. Watch who knows which one to trust on Sunday.

Chicago blues has an address: 2120 South Michigan Avenue, home of Chess Records from 1957 to 1967. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Etta James all cut records in that building, which makes it one of the most important recording addresses in American music.

Start with Muddy. His set at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival — Otis Spann on piano, James Cotton on harp — is often called the first live blues album, and "Got My Mojo Working" had the crowd out of their seats. Watch it and you'll understand why a generation of British kids built careers on it.

Those kids came to see the place for themselves. The Rolling Stones climbed the Chess stairs in June 1964 and recorded an instrumental they named after the building's address: "2120 South Michigan Avenue." Willie Dixon's widow, Marie, restored the building in 1993, and Blues Heaven runs hourly tours Tuesday through Saturday.

The bridge from Chess to now is Buddy Guy, a Chess session guitarist who became the last living giant of the Chicago sound. His "Five Long Years" at Crossroads 2010 with Jonny Lang and Ronnie Wood shows why Eric Clapton once called him the best guitar player alive.

Then the city invented a second genre and exported it. From 1977 to 1982, Frankie Knuckles held the DJ residency at the Warehouse, 206 South Jefferson in the West Loop, and the music he played there took the name "house." London and Ibiza turned it into a global industry, and Chicago only landmarked the building in 2023.

The current generation carries both threads. Noname grew up in Bronzeville listening to Buddy Guy, broke out on Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap, and her 2023 Tiny Desk closes with Smino and Saba as Ghetto Sage. It's one of the best 20 minutes the series has produced.

Your homework is Jamila Woods at the Tiny Desk: three songs, a poet's pen, and a groove that could've come out of a Chess session. Go in that order — Muddy, Buddy, Noname, Jamila — and you've heard six decades of one city.

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The pilgrimage is Johnnie's Beef at 7500 W. North Avenue in Elmwood Park, open since 1961. It's cash only with no indoor seating, and the line runs out the door. Order the combo (beef plus char-grilled sausage), hot and sweet, dipped.

Don't skip the lemon Italian ice. Chicago Magazine called Johnnie's "the Mecca of Italian Beef," and the ice is how you put out the fire from the giardiniera. Eat both standing on the hood of your rental like everyone else.

Deep dish is for tourists — locals order tavern-style: cracker-thin crust, crumbled sausage, and party-cut into squares. Vito & Nick's on the South Side has been doing it since the post-war years and has a real claim to inventing the style. Pat's in Lincoln Park is the North Side answer.

If you must go thick, go to Pequod's on Clybourn. Burt Katz's pan pie has a ring of caramelized cheese burned into the crust, and it's the one deep dish that locals will defend.

For fine dining, the answer is Smyth in the West Loop. It's been Chicago's only three-star restaurant since Alinea lost its third star last fall. Can't get a table? The Loyalist, its casual sister spot from the same husband-and-wife team, makes one of the best burgers in the city.

The table everyone's actually chasing is Kasama in West Town. It was the first Filipino restaurant anywhere to earn a Michelin star and is now at two. The tasting menu books weeks out, but the daytime bakery line is worth it on its own.

The full-week trail: Johnnie's on the way in from O'Hare, Kasama pastries Friday morning, Vito & Nick's before a night out, Smyth for the splurge, Pequod's for the hangover. That's Chicago in five stops, without a single tourist deep dish downtown.

The best golfer on the planet has a losing Presidents Cup record. Scottie Scheffler can beat anyone on earth by himself, but pair him with a partner and the math gets messy — which tells you something about how much of life is a team event.

Foursomes is alternate shot. You don't get to play your own ball — you play it from wherever your partner left it, in the rough or behind a tree. That's marriage, it's a business partnership, it's every close friendship that's lasted more than a decade.

The partners who win foursomes don't apologize for every bad shot, and they don't keep score of whose fault it was. They walk to the ball together and figure out the next one. Try that the next time someone you love hands you a mess.

Snedeker picked a 21-year-old over a U.S. Open champion and said the best advice past captains gave him was "you have to trust your gut". Most of us have the data on the people in our lives already. What we lack is the nerve to act on what we already know.

Look at your bench. Who's the person who'll tell you your swing is off, your plan is thin, or you're drinking too much? If you can't name one in five seconds, you don't have a bench — you have an audience.

Geoff Ogilvy spent years learning every contour of the course he's now trying to win on. The people who know you best don't just know your strengths — they know every place you tend to miss. That's not a threat. It's the whole reason to keep them close.

Here's the hard one: you can't pick your teammates, but you do decide whether you're worth having in someone's cart. Be the partner who makes the putt after the other guy hit it in the water.

The game of the week is Texas at Tennessee. No. 1 goes to No. 14 at noon on ABC for the first meeting between the two since the 1969 Cotton Bowl and the Longhorns' first-ever trip to Neyland. College GameDay is on the Ayres Hall lawn, with Johnny Knoxville as the guest picker, because of course.

Texas has earned the top spot — the 24-23 comeback over then-No. 1 Ohio State is the best win in the country. But a first SEC road game in front of 100,000-plus in orange is a different animal. If Arch Manning leaves Knoxville unbeaten, the Heisman conversation gets very short.

Ole Miss has the best résumé. The Rebels are the only team with two ranked wins (Louisville, LSU), jumped to No. 4 and pulled first-place votes. They go to No. 21 Florida at 3:30, and the Gators — ranked for the first time under Jon Sumrall — are exactly the kind of team that trips up a contender in September.

Georgia is quietly doing Georgia things: 3-0, No. 2, and hosting a wounded Oklahoma at 3:30. The Sooners dropped out of the poll after a 14-6 win over New Mexico, and Sanford Stadium isn't where you go to get healthy.

The night slate is all about desperation. No. 20 Oregon at No. 12 USC (7:30, NBC) comes after the Ducks lost to Oklahoma State, and No. 23 Texas A&M at No. 10 LSU (7:30, ABC) comes after the Aggies lost at home to unranked Kentucky. Someone's playoff hopes take a real hit before midnight Eastern.

Don't sleep on Friday. Defending national champion Indiana — 27-21 over Miami in January — hosts Northwestern at 8 on FOX. The Hoosiers are No. 5 and have outscored their three opponents 145-16, and nobody's talking about them like the champs.

The pecking order right now: Texas and Ole Miss at the top, Georgia and Notre Dame right behind, Indiana and Miami lurking. For Texas to stay No. 1 through October, it needs to win on the road in the SEC — starting tomorrow at noon — before the Red River game on Oct. 10. Everything else is noise until then.

The anchor is Sunday singles at Medinah, 12 matches that decide the Cup. Build the weekend backward from there. Fly into O'Hare — Medinah is out in the northwest suburbs, so skip Midway.

Base yourself in the West Loop. You're walking distance from the Warehouse building on Jefferson, Smyth, and the Fulton Market restaurant row, and it's an easy drive out to the course. Book early — the Chicago Marathon is Oct. 11 and hotel prices spike that weekend.

Thursday: land at O'Hare and make Johnnie's Beef in Elmwood Park your first stop on the way into the city. Check in, then have tavern-style pizza and a cold beer. Go to bed early.

Friday: out to Medinah for foursomes, the format where captains' pairings live or die. Back downtown by evening, then the Chicago Architecture Center river cruise at golden hour. It's the one tourist thing locals will tell you to do.

Saturday: morning run on the Lakefront Trail, then the Chess Records tour at 2120 S. Michigan (tours run on the hour, noon to 3). Dinner at Kasama or Smyth if you planned ahead, Pequod's if you didn't.

The underrated move is the Indiana Dunes. They're 50 miles east, and on a clear day you can see the Chicago skyline across the lake from the top of a 192-foot sand dune. Most visitors never leave Cook County, and they're missing the best view of the city.

Sunday: singles at Medinah, then O'Hare. Remember the principle: the best trips come from one anchor — a Cup, a concert, a kickoff — not from a city brochure. Pick the one thing, then let everything else fall into place around it.

Chicago's gym is the Lakefront Trail: 18 miles along Lake Michigan, split since 2018 into separate bike and pedestrian paths. It's flat, fast, and has the skyline for company, which is why every marathoner in the city trains on it.

The harder test is across the state line: the 3 Dune Challenge at Indiana Dunes State Park. It's 1.5 miles and 552 vertical feet up Mt. Jackson, Mt. Holden and Mt. Tom, most of it in deep sand.

Don't let the distance fool you. Running on sand takes about 1.6 times the energy of hard ground, and you slide back half a step on every climb. It's a lower-body and lungs session that no treadmill will replicate.

The pros at Medinah are getting their own version. A player who goes out in both of Saturday's sessions walks 36 holes in one day over rolling ground, then gets up Sunday for a singles match that decides the Cup. Fitness shows up on the 16th green on Sunday, not on the first tee Thursday.

The portable version: 10 rounds of one minute hard up the steepest hill or stairwell you can find, walking back down to recover. Finish with 3 sets of 15 walking lunges per leg. It's 30 minutes and hits exactly what 36 holes demands — legs under load while you're already tired.

Over 55,000 people will run the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 11. None of them got ready in September — they got ready in the heat of July on that lakefront path, when nobody was watching.

Same rule for you, in reverse. Most golfers shut it down when the leaves turn. The work you do in October and November — the hills, the lunges, the dunes — is what shows up on the first tee in April. Do the unsexy work now.