Tiger Woods won here: Warwick Hills and the Buick Open

For most of half a century, if you wanted to watch the best golfers in the world swing a club in Michigan, you came to a course in Grand Blanc Township. Warwick Hills Golf & Country Club, out on South Saginaw Road, hosted the Buick Open — for decades the state’s only regular PGA Tour stop. The first one teed off in 1958 with a purse of $52,000, which sounds like pocket change now but was the richest in the country at the time.

The list of winners reads like a hall of fame. Billy Casper took the inaugural title. Later came Ben Crenshaw, Fred Couples, Jim Furyk, Vijay Singh — and Tiger Woods, who tied the course record with a 61 and won the tournament three times. The 17th and 18th holes ran along a natural amphitheater of a hillside, and the galleries packed in tens of thousands deep on a good Sunday in early August.

Then it ended. When General Motors went through bankruptcy and government rescue in 2009, the company’s golf sponsorship dried up, and the Buick Open played its final round that year. For a course that had been the summer center of Michigan golf, the silence was sudden.

It didn’t last forever. In 2018 the tour came back — this time the PGA Tour Champions, the circuit for players fifty and older — with a tournament called the Ally Challenge. The crowds returned to the same hillside, watching names they’d cheered in their prime walk the same fairways. Warwick Hills, it turns out, isn’t done being the place where Michigan goes to watch golf.