Professional golf”s major championship season is just around the corner.
We”re just a couple of weeks away from the start of the 108th United States Open Golf Championship at a new tournament venue, the Torrey Pines Golf Course alongside the Pacific Ocean in San Diego. In mid-July the British Open will be contested at the Royal Birkdale Golf Links in Southport, England. Finally, the major season reaches its conclusion in mid-August with the playing of the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills Country club just outside Detroit.
The season”s first major of the year, the Masters, is always played at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. The other three majors determine their site based on an active rotation schedule. During the course of a long career, similar to the ones enjoyed by Jack Nicklaus or Tom Watson, there is some familiarity with a major site when it returns to that course every decade or so.
However, most professional golfers don”t get to enjoy a 30-year career. They find themselves a the top rung of the game for no more than 10-15 years, so often the venue for a grand slam event is a new experience for the vast majority of the field.
The British Open has the easiest rotation to figure out. The Open is always played on a links-style course near the ocean. Every fifth year the Open Championship is played at the Old Course at St. Andrews in northeastern Scotland. St. Andrews is considered the birthplace of golf and is also home to the Royal & Ancient, the blueblood organization that runs the tournament.
The Open rotation visits other four courses in Scotland, namely Muirfield, Carnoustie, Turnberry and Troon. It is also played at four English sites, specifically Hoylake, Lytham and St. Anne”s, Birkdale and St. George”s.
The Royal & Ancient has emphasized infrastructure with its sites, namely an adequate amount of hotel rooms as well as on site space for its massive tented village. It also began a campaign at the turn of the century to have its venues lengthened, a direct response to Tiger Woods” 19-under-par total at the 2000 Open at St. Andrews.
The USGA hosts the United States Open and for the longest time it rotated among some dozen or so established old-style golf clubs from the golden age of American golf architecture.
East Coast courses such as Winged Foot, the Country Club, Merion, Baltusrol, Oak Hill, Congressional, Oakmont and Shinnecock Hills regularly hosted the National Open.
Middle America venues such as Oakland Hills, Medinah, Southern Hills and Inverness were the sites of multiple U.S. Opens.
The Open also ventures to the West Coast, namely Northern California, as it regularly returnes to Pebble Beach and the Olympic Club.
More recently, the U.S. Open rotation has been impacted by two scheduling elements. The USGA started going to public access golf courses such as Pinehurst and Bethpage. This year”s Open site, the municipally owned Torrey Pines, continues with that public course tradition as does the site of the 2015 Open, Chambers Bay outside of Seattle.
On the negative side, some of the older and more traditional courses have distanced themselves from the USGA. Two notable examples are the Country Club, which first hosted the U.S. Open in 1913 when Francis Ouimet won, and Winged Foot, site of Bobby Jones” 1929 Open triumph. These two clubs have tired of the mercurial ways of the USGA and no longer find it worth their while to host the United States Open.
Other traditional Open venues have aligned themselves with the PGA Championship in recent years. Sometimes hosting the PGA comes along with the package deal of getting to host the Ryder Cup. This is the Oakland Hills scenario, site of this year”s PGA and the 2004 Ryder Cup. Medinah has hosted the 1999 and 2006 PGA and will be the site of the 2012 Ryder Cup.
Although there is no fifth major, for the longest time the PGA was considered the “fourth” major, the weak sister of the majors. The PGA had a lot of one-hit wonder golf courses that were poorly suited to host a major, and once they did, it was the last time we ever saw them.
During the modern era, the PGA has been held at such places as Laurel Valley, Columbine, Pecan Valley, NCR Country Club, Tanglewood, Oak Tree, Kemper Lakes and Crooked Stick.
In the 1990s, the PGA started going to traditional U.S. Open sites such as Inverness, Southern Hills, Winged Foot, Medinah, Atlanta Athletic, Hazeltine, Oak Hill and Baltusrol. The courses were set up more fair than when they were U.S. Open venues and the professionals favored the way the PGA of America ran its championship.
The PGA also mimicked the route taken by the Open folks when they added Whistling Straits to its rotation. A new Pete Dye course north of Milwaukee, Whistling Straits is a visually beautiful course that proved itself to be a stern test of golf as evidenced by Vijay Singh”s overtime win over Justin Leonard and Chris DiMarco in 2004. It will host the PGA again in 2010 and 2015.
In keeping with the newness tradition, the 2012 PGA visits another Pete Dye course, the Kiawah Island Resort in coastal South Carolina. Kiawah hosted the 1991 Ryder Cup and should be a fascinating venue for a major championship.
The summer majors are just around the corner. Will Torrey Pines show itself to be another Bethpage, the 2002 U.S. Open site, or will it fall flat like Olympia Fields, the 2003 Open venue that will probably never again be visited? We”ll know the answer in just two more weeks.
