cover story
US Open 2014
A return to ‘Middle Earth’.
The USGA’s focus of ‘maintenance up the middle’ will be clearly evident during this month’s
US Open at Pinehurst No. 2, where the fairways have been significantly widened and the
rough completely replaced with waste areas.
Paul Prendergast
A
If you believe this is just a one-off exercise
and the powers that be at the USGA will
quickly come to their senses, you’re not going
to believe your eyes next year – when the
championship travels to the windswept, coastal
‘links’ of Chambers Bay south of Seattle.
pply a simple word association to the
words ‘US Open’ and what is it that
immediately springs to mind?
Any shortlist of responses will no doubt
include the word ‘rough’, perhaps ‘thick’
rough. Images of corridor-width fairways,
callisthenic manoeuvres from the world’s
best to advance a ball from rough no further
than they could throw it and a prevalence of
numbers on scoreboards with + signs in front
of them are other possibilities.
However, that’s for next year. For the moment,
our focus is on one of American golf’s national
treasures in Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina.
Do you remember the late Payne Stewart
in 1999, holing an 18-footer on the final
green to hold off Phil Mickelson to win his 2nd
national Open by a single stroke? And who
could forget the image of Stewart following
the putt into the hole, with a balletic fist
thrust that is captured in a commemorative
statue by the clubhouse?
If your word association and the images
conjured included all of the above, you’re not
going to believe your eyes this month.
And if your memory extends back to the
past two US Opens at Pinehurst’s venerable
No. 2 course in 1999 and 2005, once again,
you won’t believe the transformation that has
occurred when the 2014 contest rolls around.
In the drizzly final-round conditions, it
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Michael Campbell’s triumph in 2005 was
much of the same but what a difference a
decade makes.
Not only has the golf course been
transformed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw,
who esteemed it an honour to be entrusted
with the opportunity to restore the course
to its earlier characteristics, but so too the
philosophy of the USGA and the path it
wants to take in presentation and agronomy
of golf courses into the future.
The 12-month Coore Crenshaw undertaking
was completed in early 2011 and was as
significant as it has been dramatic.
Every fairway was widened by as much as half,
all rough was removed with just two heights of
grass e