When Hazeltine National made its debut as a major championship host, competing pros were only too happy to throw the golf course to the wolves — or whatever animal happened to come to mind.

“It’s like playing in a kennel, with all the doglegs,” American golfer Bob Rosburg said during the 1970 U.S. Open.

Another participant, Dave Hill, responding to a question about Hazeltine’s deficiencies, said, “What it lacks is 80 acres of corn and a few cows.”

It took 21 years and significant rework to get Hazeltine back on the big stage, with the 1991 U.S. Open. But that return set off a quarter century of events that any club would happily crow about: two PGA Championships, numerous USGA events and now the Ryder Cup, which begins Friday.

That makes the club in Chaska, a suburb southwest of Minneapolis, one of only two courses to have staged the U.S. Open, PGA Championship, U.S. Women’s Open, U.S. Senior Open, U.S. Amateur and Ryder Cup. Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina is the other.

Not bad for a place once ridiculed as a cow pasture.

“It’s a wonderful golf course,” Darren Clarke, the European captain, said this summer. “A very fair golf course.”

It was considered anything but during that 1970 U.S. Open, which was held on the course just eight years after it had opened on 186 acres of farmland bordering Hazeltine Lake. The designer, Robert Trent Jones, was hamstrung by the drab prairie landscape, possibly made worse by a hasty tree-planting scheme.

In 1966, the club had staged the U.S. Women’s Open, which brought no outcry. So the door was open for the U.S. Open four years later.

The players at that event, though, found themselves flummoxed by the mixture of blind tee shots, sharp doglegs and little to blunt the prairie winds.

“The course lacks definition,” Jack Nicklaus said at the time in a preview article for Sports Illustrated. “It’s like playing blind man’s bluff.”

Don January and two other prominent pros did not even bother trying to qualify. As the story goes, January came to check out the course in the preceding weeks and was confounded by one tee shot after another that failed to present a target.

“Where do I hit it?” he asked his caddie at one point.

“Aim at that cloud right there,” came the response.

“I don’t aim at clouds,” January huffed.

Golfers on the first tee needed to aim at a distant farm silo. Approach shots from the 18th fairway were aimed at the chimney of the house of the club’s founder, Totton Heffelfinger. And when a hard wind blew during the first two rounds, the claws came out.

“Pardon me while I throw up,” Nicklaus said after his opening 81.

Arnold Palmer shot 79 and Gary Player carded an 80. Nothing, though, topped the sarcasm spit out by Hill after the second round.

“They ruined a good farm when they built this course,” Hill said. “My two kids could lay out a better course than that. The man who designed this golf course held the blueprints upside down.”

Asked what could be done to improve it, Hill said, “Plow it up and start over.”

Which is essentially what Hazeltine did after the USGA made it clear the Open was not coming back without significant changes.

Seven holes underwent extensive revisions in a 1978 upgrade, including the transformation of No. 16 from a lackluster par 3 into a dramatic par 4 around Lake Hazeltine that is now both the hardest and most picturesque hole on the course.

“Lots can happen,” Clarke said of the hole, which will be No. 7 in a Ryder Cup rerouting. “Have a go at it, come up short and go in the water, go long and you can chip it back in the water quite easily.”

No. 17, meanwhile, was converted from a par 4 to a par 3, with a green guarded by two ponds and four bunkers. It proved the undoing of Scott Simpson when the Open returned in 1991, when he hooked a tee shot that opened the door for Payne Stewart’s victory.

When the USGA dragged its feet in awarding another Open, the PGA of America swooped in with its crown jewel, the PGA Championship, in 2002 and again in 2009. Both will be remembered for Tiger Woods finishing second — with Rich Beem holding off Woods’ four-birdie finish in 2002 and Y.E. Yang stunningly overtaking Woods in 2009.

And now comes the Ryder Cup this week.

At 7,628 yards, Hazeltine officially will be the second-longest course to host the biennial event, just 30 yards shorter than Medinah, in Illinois, where it was staged four years ago. It is likely to be set up somewhat shorter this week, however, to create more risk/reward drama at both par 5s on the back nine and the drivable par-4 fifth.

“We want the fans to enjoy it,” said Davis Love III, the U.S. captain. “I always say I want to see home runs when I go to the baseball game. I want to see goals scored. Defense is great, but we want it to be exciting.”

The same philosophy applies to the rough, which has grown in thick but will be cut at 3 inches. Players missing the fairway will therefore have a recovery opportunity to avoid conceding the hole.

But Love, also the U.S. captain at Medinah, where the Europeans staged a victorious four-point comeback on the final day, said Hazeltine would test more than just driving ability.

“It’s not just length,” he said. “You have to be a good lag putter. You have to be a great iron player. It’s going to be hard to get close to the hole if it’s windy.”

Clarke concurred, adding that the course would be “set up in a way that we’re there to entertain and give the spectators a lot to shout about.”