The run-up to this US Open has been all about reconciliation. Rory McIlroy is back with his wife Erica after a month-long separation, Scottie Scheffler returned to the winners’ enclosure after a yawning seven-week drought and now the tournament could see the restoration of the US Golf Association’s reputation as the arch-merchants of the major golf clubs. pick-up.
As the hours counted down to the start of the 124th running of the U.S. National Championship, dread filled the humid North Carolina air, as did a distinct smell of deja vu.
Two words dominated the whispers among the pros: “borderline” and “carnage.” In golf, and especially on putting greens, one thing invariably leads to another, and as far as the USGA is concerned, it’s as inevitable as night follows day.
Pinehurst is a US gem, and the resort’s second course is the Cullinan Diamond, but there are fears the USGA’s rediscovery of its obsession with par could turn the treasure into a mockery. If there is a farce, it will almost certainly unfold not in the wire grass of the sandhills that flank the fairways, but on the turtle greens with their sadistic drainage. There is one area behind the 14th green that Shay Knight, Viktor Hovland’s caddy, has dubbed “f—–ville.”
If the putting surfaces are too fast, things could very well get chaotic, as Tiger Woods said in a thinly veiled warning to the officials. “I’ve been as guilty as the rest of the guys I’ve played with in the practice rounds. We’ve put off a lot of greens,” he said.
“It depends on how serious the USGA wants to make this, how close they want to get us to those parties. I foresee seeing some guys playing ping pong back and forth. We were just kidding that by the end of the week the greens get so slippery that you bend down to read a putt and your putter slips.
Defending champion Wyndham Clark had warned on Monday: “If they get firmer and faster, the greens will be on the border.” Since then it has been nothing but bright sunshine.
USGA championship director Jon Bodenhamer did little to allay the concerns Wednesday. “Our strategy is based on tough but fair, but these are tricky greens and there is no problem with that,” he said.
Admittedly, Pinehurst is always difficult. Only four players have finished under par in the three US Opens held here and Bodenhamer referenced Mother Nature and stayed true to Donald Ross’s goals when he designed this course in 1907.
But as Woods noted, the Scottish-born genius never intended his upside-down cereal bowl creations to look like this. “When Donald made the greens so strict, I don’t think he intended for them to run at 13 on the stimp meter,” Woods said. “When he first made them, they were the speed that the fairways are now.”
So don’t blame Ross, the players say. It is the USGA that has insisted on the similarity to marble. Paul Casey’s coach, Peter Kostis, perhaps summed up the prevailing feeling best. “People will complain that the greens on No. 2 are unfair or ridiculous,” he said. “When Donald Ross designed them, the green speeds were about 6 or 7 on the stump. It’s the push for ridiculously faster green speeds that’s causing the problems and the USGA is very good at that.”
Yes, they have history. Before the birth of LIV, the US Open was the controversial point of the professional game. From the middle to the end of the last decade, June was an annual week of the USGA’s unerring ability to spark furious discord in the locker room — and hilarity in the living room.
It was very nice to see spoiled professionals being humbled and humiliated. But it couldn’t last. The players had endured enough to be the butt of the joke and mutiny was threatened.
In 2019 a story in American magazine Golf overview claimed that some of the top players, including Dustin Johnson and McIlroy, had actually discussed boycotting the major. Mike Davis, then-USGA CEO, didn’t deny it. “Certainly, we read that report, but we decided to take the high road,” he said. Well, he liked it there.
Davis was at the center of the controversy. Golf tournaments should be about the players, not the horn players. Yet for so long he has held himself out as a visionary and too often the spotlight has fallen on him as the villain.
In 2015, there was the absurdity of Seattle’s Chambers Bay, where, in the words of Henrik Stenson, “broccoli” seemed to be growing on the greens. In 2016 at Oakmont, Dustin Johnson wasn’t even sure if he was playing with a two-shot penalty or not. The USGA informed him afterwards that this was the case, but luckily Johnson had a big enough lead to avoid an outcry.
In 2017, Erin Hills, with its wide fairways, looked more like a regular event than a major, especially after bowing to player pressure to push back on the rough, and in 2018 at Shinnecock Hills, after they pledged allegiance that they would not make the same mistakes as When they ‘lost’ the greens fourteen years earlier, they went ahead and made exactly the same mistakes.
Phil Mickelson was so incensed that he chased down a runaway putt and hit the ball again while it was in motion. It was a stupid protest, but a protest nonetheless.
With Davis stepping down and criticism taking its toll, the USGA has largely behaved since then. But clips on social media here of balls rolling from apparently stationary next to the holeside to 30 yards away on the slope have raised suspicions that another horror show could await in the cans.
Of course, the USGA could present generous pin positions, turn on the hoses, and guard against “losing” the greens—forgoing image reparations. The question is: can they possibly resist actions that are contrary to their nature? Let the carnage begin.