Today’s USGA got a lot of things
right at this year’s U.S. Open
The USGA is coming to an un- derstanding that the U.S. Open is entertainment. It has taken a century for the awakening, but
the time has come. Golf as a pastime,
the USGA acknowledges, is not generating enough new participants and
means are needed to rev up interest.
This year’s championship revealed
ways in which the association is tilting
into show business while maintaining
the integrity of the game.
Take the super-marquee pairing for
the first two rounds: Tiger Woods, Phil
Mickelson and Bubba Watson. Woods
and Mickelson are established stars, of
course, but the zing came in that they are
not very companionable. Bond tees it up
with Goldfinger. Watson, our newest folk
hero, was perhaps meant to take the edge
off. Oddly, the threesome was put off at
7: 33 a.m. on Thursday. Too early to draw
a substantial live gallery? In fact, the
crowd was 10-deep. But that was beside
the point. The larger thought was that
sending them off in the afternoon would
create a television-viewer conflict with the second game of
the NBA Finals. Going early Thursday was smart booking.
My long-held first impression of an Open course dates
back to Hazeltine, in 1970. Narrow-aisle fairways slicing
through fields of hay. That forbidding definition between
fairway and rough has been mitigated. The first cut of
rough at the Olympic Club was a generous seven or eight
yards wide, and just a couple of inches above the fairway
grass. The second, or primary cut was only a few inches
higher. The density of the rough still made it difficult to get
holding spin on shots to greens, but not in every case. That
aside, to the less sophisticated golfing eye the rough in
general seemed to be more user friendly.
Going into the third round, the event was turning into a
slog—lots of bogeys and double bogeys—largely because of
the sloped, highway-hard and ultra-fast greens. Therefore,
for Saturday Mike Davis, the USGA’s executive director and
the man in charge of the course setup, cut some comfortable
pin positions and, more importantly, watered the greens
Some players
may not have
liked the Woods-Watson-Mickelson
grouping, but it
underscores a new
USGA vision.
well. Voilà! Shots that had been running through and off the
greens were holding a little more, there were even some
spin-back approaches, and in all there were a lot more
cheers from the gallery. Quite a difference from the previous
man in charge of setup, who at Bethpage in 2002, despite a
hard rain and punishing wind in the second round, held fast
to a tee position on the long par- 4 10th from which some
players could not reach the fairway. Mike Davis has a good
heart—and show-biz moxie.
While Davis vows, sort of, that the USGA will not bow to the
generally desired sudden-death playoff, he acknowledges that
going to sudden-death if the 18-hole Monday playoff ends up
knotted, is giving in. The guess here is the give-in on this issue
will go further sooner rather than later, ideally with a mini-playoff format used at the British Open and PGA.
Finally, the USGA’s long-time image as a rather austere
entity when it came to the business side of the national
championship is no more. A vast “Village” at the Open site
consists of large corporate tents bought and paid for by the
likes of Chevron, American Express and Lexus. And the
USGA itself operates a merchandise pavilion as big as a
Nordstrom’s main floor. The pavilion plays a major role in
the many millions of dollars overall that the USGA brings
in through the championship, revenue the association uses
for its many good works on behalf of the game. That’s always
been the case. It’s the transparency that is welcome. N
