USGA should make the national Open truly national in scope
By Bill Felber
It’s well past time for the USGA to make the national Open a national event in deed as well as in name.
The nation’s championship golf tournament has been played 121 times since its founding in 1895. Yet in all that time, the USGA has cited the championship in only 19 of the nation’s 50 states, utterly ignoring three-fifths of the country.
Worse, it intends to continue that policy. Through 2027, the USGA has announced that it will take the tournament to courses in five states, four of which are already the four most frequented by the USGA.
Of the 28 sites that either have hosted or have been designated to host a U.S. Open since 2000, 15 are in either California or New York.
Only three – Southern Hills in 2001, Olympia Fields in 2003 and Erin Hills in 2017 – have been played on a course that is both east of San Diego and west of Pittsburgh…a little matter of 2,400 miles.
I like visiting San Diego as much as the next guy. But the reality is that the USGA siting practices have turned the U.S. Open into a coastal event. If you don’t live within driving distance of an ocean, the likelihood is great that the most important golf event in the nation will never again be held anywhere near you.
https://progolfnow.com/2021/06/20/2021-u-s-open-winners-losers-torrey-pines/
As mentioned earlier, 31 of the 50 states have NEVER hosted a U.S. Open. For the record, those 31 states include more than one-third of the nation’s population.
And the trend toward bi-coastal anchoring is increasing. Since 2000, 40 states with more than 60 percent of the national population have not hosted an Open. Those ignored states include two of the four and four of the 10 most populous.
I live in Kansas, a relatively small state but one that happens to be almost precisely in the middle of the nation. But to the USGA siting team, neither Kansas nor any of its neighbors exist. Since 2000, the USGA has held only one Open within 500 miles of my home, that being the 2001 event at Tulsa’s Southern Hills.
It has done so only twice in the past half century, and only five times in the event’s entire history. That’s as often as the tournament has been held in California just since 2008, or in the New York City area since 2004.
It didn’t used to be this way. Between 1975 and 1999, the Open had a far more national profile. In that quarter century the championship was contested in 14 different states, visiting none of those states more than four times. Nine of those championships were held on courses that are located in the now-ignored 2,400 mile vastness between Pittsburgh and San Diego.
Since then, the Open has declined to return to a half dozen states that hosted eight Opens between 1950 and 1974, and those eight include some pretty significant ones: Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Ohio.
In place of those, it has gone to only two states – Chambers Bay in Seattle, Wash., and Erin Hills, Wis. – that had not previously hosted an Open.
There may have been a day when the USGA could argue that it was forced to limit the siting of its premier event due to circumstances outside its control: lack of quality courses, insufficient hotel or related facilities, or weather.
But those arguments have been invalid for some time. Anybody who has glanced through lists of the 10 best courses in each state grasps that no area has a monopoly on quality layouts. Other major sporting events – notably college football – impose substantial hospitality demands on areas all over the nation that those areas routinely deal with.
How about weather? Texas, Oklahoma and numerous southern states can certainly be hot in June. But they’re not significantly hotter – if hotter at all — than, for instance, North Carolina, where the USGA will play the Open at Pinehurst in 2024. That will be the fourth playing at Pinehurst just since 1999.
Bottom line: The USGA has allowed itself to become far too narrow and repetitive in its consideration of Open sites. It needs to expand the selection process in order to bring the national championship to a broader cross-section of America.