You Can't Outdo God

One of Our Own Explains His Part in Erin Hills’ Strange Path to Attracting the Us Open 
 

- Ron Whitten

IN JUNE, ERIN HILLS, the mammoth rumpled blanket of a golf course in tiny Erin, Wisconsin, will host the first of what will be many US Opens. I say that with confidence, because it’s the right course in the right place at the right time. Erin Hills is a privately owned public golf course, befitting the USGA’s populist desire to grow the game, in an untapped market. The course sits on 264 hectares, an expanse unprecedented in championship golf. There’s enough room to accommodate every money-making skybox, hospitality palace and merchandise tent imaginable. There’s room for 100 000 spectators, if the USGA wanted that many. It doesn’t. Ticket sales were capped at 35 000, evidently to avoid traffic snarls. The course will be a genuine test. Yes, it’s ridiculously long from its back tees at 7 633 metres, but it isn’t intended to ever be played at that length. For the Open, it’ll officially measure 7 035 metres but will be shorter on any given day because each hole has enormous flexibility. It’s a par 72, first for a US Open since Pebble Beach in 1992, and at least a couple of par 5s could force even big hitters to use a fairway wood to reach those greens in two.

Agreed, it’s not a genuine links where one can bounce every shot into every target. There are some elevated fairways and elevated greens, and that’s by design. The wind blows a considerable amount of the time at Erin Hills, and one of its tests is handling aerial shots in the wind. Fairways pitch and heave, dip and tumble, with few level lies anywhere. Its bunkers are real hazards where recovery is often secondary to escape. The greens are pure bentgrass, the first time in a US Open in forever, slick and smooth surfaces on which there will be plenty of birdie putts made.