The 122nd annual United States Open Golf Championship tees it up Thursday at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, just west of Boston. A mixed field of 156 top-flight professional and amateur golfers will be competing for our National Open. It is the oldest golf championship in America, having initially been contested in 1895. Spain’s Jon Rahm is the defending titlist, having won the championship last June at Torrey Pines in San Diego.
The Country Club is one of the 100 oldest golfing clubs in America. It was one of the five founding golf clubs to form the United States Golf Association in 1894 alongside Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, St. Andrews located in Hastings on Hudson in New York, the Newport Country Club in Rhode Island, and the Chicago Golf Club. The original idea behind the forming of the USGA was to organize a National Amateur Championship. That first U.S. Amateur was held the following year on October 3, 1895 at Newport. Almost as an afterthought, the USGA held its U.S. Open the following day on Oct. 4. There was a total field of 11 contestants and 10 of them were professionals. Newport was just a nine-hole course way back in 1895 and that inaugural Open was contested in one day by playing the course four times around. Englishman Horace Rawlins won that first Open and the 21-year-old pocketed the first-place prize of $150. The total purse was $335. Last year Rahm added $2.25 million to his bank account for his win.
The Country Club hosted its first USGA event in 1902 with the playing of the U.S. Women’s Amateur. In 1913 The Country Club hosted its first National Open. The Open was held in September and had the added perk of featuring the world’s top two linksters of note, namely Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. Vardon was from the island of Jersey and was known for winning the British Open six times as well as the 1900 U.S. Open. Englishman Ted Ray was the power player of his time. He had won the British Open in 1912 and would go on to win the U.S. Open in 1920. As fate would have it, Vardon and Ray ended up tied atop the leader board after 72 holes with local amateur golfer Francis Ouimet. Ouimet had spent his teen-aged years as a caddie at The Country Club. The 20-year-old Ouimet, who had won the 1912 Country Club Cup, won the 18-hole playoff over Ray and Vardon and gave American golf a big boost.
Some 50 years later, The Country Club hosted the 1963 U.S. Open. After four rounds, another three-way playoff was held with the game’s top golfer Arnold Palmer atop the leader board alongside veteran Jacky Cupit and 1952 U.S. Open titlist Julius Boros. They were tied at 9-over-par. Boros won the playoff and received his first-place check of $17,500. The 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club marked the 75th anniversary of Ouimet’s triumph. With Englishman Nick Faldo and Curtis Strange tied at 6-under-par at the end of regulation, there would be another 18-hole playoff. Strange prevailed to win his first of two consecutive National Open titles. Faldo would go on to accumulate six major wins in becoming one of the greats of the game.
The Ryder Cup Matches were contested at The Country Club in 1999 and it was a most memorable one as Justin Leonard led a furious Team USA Sunday comeback, capped off by his 40-foot birdie putt on the 17th green, just across the street from the house Ouimet grew up in. For whatever reason, the USGA and The Country Club didn’t connect on hosting the 2013 U.S. Open for the 100th anniversary of Ouimet’s shocking win. Instead The Country Club held the U.S. Amateur won by Matt Fitzpatrick. The Country Club has been the site of six U.S. Ams.
This time around The Country Club will play to a par of 70 and a distance of 7,312 yards. The site holds 27 holes and the “Championship Composite” includes most of the holes from the Squirrel and the Clyde nines. The majority of the course was designed by William Flynn (Shinnecock Hills, Merion), one of the godfathers of America’s golden age of golf course architecture.
The U.S. Open includes 91 exempt golfers coupled with 65 linksters who qualified into the tournament this past Monday. Exempt golfers include past champs of the U.S. Open during the past 10 years, major winners from the last five years, the top 60 in the world, the top 30 from the previous year’s PGA Tour standings, and several categories for amateur golfers. Everyone else has to earn their way in, meaning that Rickie Fowler is on the outside looking in while Brian Stuard has found a way to qualify seven times.
Because it’s been 34 years since the last National Open was contested at The Country Club, it will be hard to favor any of the top golfers in the world due to course familiarity. On top of that, the USGA has changed its course setup mentality since then with a less heavy emphasis upon 6-inch high rough. The meat and potatoes of the course are the par-4s, and the ultimate champion will need to be a precision iron master. This just might be the type of course setup that favors the likes of Collin Morikawa, Will Zalatoris, Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele or Cameron Smith. All of the aforementioned fivesome are 20-somethings, Morikawa and Thomas own two major titles apiece, Smith won the Players Championship, and Zalatoris and Schauffele have been in the hunt in recent majors. Yet the main reason I mention this group of five is because all of them are ranked within the top 10 on the PGA Tour in the category of Shots Gained: Approaching the Green. While The Country Club is not absurdly long by tour standards, it will be to the winner’s advantage to be able to hit precision iron shots from the middle of the fairway to the distant-tucked pins.
One golfer who will not be a factor next week at The Country Club is Tiger Woods. Woods withdrew from the Open earlier this week. He contended that his leg just wasn’t strong enough for the 72-hole grind of a United States Open. Tiger did surprise the golf world by making the cut and playing all 72 holes at the Masters in April on a course that’s a difficult walk. However, last month he withdrew after three rounds at the PGA Championship because of intense leg pain, the result of a serious auto accident in February of 2021. Tiger definitely moves the needle when it comes to teeing it up at one of the game’s premier events, yet it just might be the new normal for him that walking 72 holes is just beyond his physical scope. Finally, it looks like Phil Mickelson will be at The Country Club next week. It will be interesting to see Phil and how he handles his return to competitive golf in America.
