By Art Spander
Special to Newsday
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — For Phil Mickelson it was a round of nostalgia. For Tiger Woods it was one of staying relevant. Others were leading this 119th U.S. Open on Saturday, but for a few hours early on Phil and Tiger were the attractions.
Copyright © 2019 Newsday. All rights reserved.
By Art Spander
For Maven Sports
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — It was misting, but it felt like rain. Justin Rose made the observation, which was on target for a chilly June morning at Pebble Beach.
Rose also was pretty much on target with his game. As usual.
Copyright 2019, The Maven
By Art Spander
For Maven Sports
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Their working areas are among the most spectacular in the world. And yet golf pros sometimes concentrate so much on what goes on the scorecard, in effect they can’t see the forest for the tees.
Copyright 2019, The Maven
By Art Spander
For Maven Sports
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — It’s the U.S. Open, America’s golfing championship, demanding, frustrating and, if the shots are pure and the bounces are fortunate, rewarding.
Copyright 2019, The Maven
By Art Spander
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Two words, one locale, a dateline that excites golfers, a landscape that thrills artists: Pebble Beach, where Bobby Jones was slammed a year before he won the Slam and where Jack Nicklaus won an Amateur, a Crosby and an Open.
Many of us know Pebble for winter storms and celebrity hijinks, but now it’s summer, when the weather is morning fog and afternoon sun, and they’re playing the 118th U.S. Amateur, so players are grinding and not goofing.
The Amateur had been played only in the East until the U.S. Golf Association chose to hold it at Pebble in 1929. Jones, the defending champ, was eliminated in the first round of match play.
Nicklaus won the Amateur at Pebble in 1961, then of course won the Crosby a couple of times and in 1972 the first Open held at Pebble. He also redesigned the par-3 fifth hole, which was moved to the edge of Carmel Bay.
Nicklaus, interestingly, planned to stay amateur and chase Jones’ records, but for a person to become as dominant as Jack did with his 18 pro majors, it was necessary for him to turn pro, which he did in 1962 — and then a few months later, he won the Open.
Surely, the kids who have success in this Amateur, which now has reached the quarterfinals, will all turn pro. Maybe they’ll be stars like Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, who remains the only man to win three consecutive U.S. Amateurs. Or maybe they’ll be near-misses, like Ricky Barnes, who won the 2002 Amateur but hasn’t done much since going pro.
But whatever transpires, the contestants will have special memories. “The 18th hole,” said quarterfinalist Austin Squires, “there’s all that water on the left and the little stretch of fairway.”
Years ago a San Francisco journalist nicknamed the iconic 18th “The Closer,” not because it ended careers but because so many match-play events ended there, the fans on one side of the fairway, the surf crashing spectacularly on the other.
Jack Neville, with the help of Douglas Grant, laid out Pebble along the rolling bluffs. “It was all there in plain sight,” Neville told me back in the 1970s. “Very little clearing was necessary. The big thing was to get as many holes possible along the bay.”
Do courses make the player, or does the player make the course? The answer is both. Nicklaus hitting that 1-iron off the stick at 17, Tiger making that birdie out of the rough at six. That’s how we think of Pebble.
The quarterfinalists think they are in some of links heaven, and that’s a figure of speech because even though the official name is Pebble Beach Golf Links, the course does not traverse linksland.
Isaiah Salinda, a quarterfinalist, is from Stanford and South San Francisco. The Pacific Ocean is no big thing, although to him Pebble always will be. Squires, from Union, Kentucky, shakes his head at views he never imagined existed until his first trip to Northern California — and Pebble.
“It’s my first time at Pebble,” said quarterfinalist Devon Bling, who plays for UCLA. “This is an unbelievable place. I prepped by playing the little Tiger Woods PGA Tour game. It looks a little different in person. This is amazing.”
Is it ever.
By Art Spander
ERIN, Wis. — This 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills, smack in the middle of somewhere southwest of Milwaukee, has the strong scent of another on a course scraped out of America’s heartland, that one in 1970 at Hazeltine, near Minneapolis.
The responses that year varied from dislike to pure hatred, the latter expressed by the late Dave Hill, a testy pro who would just as soon drop a critic with punch as drop a 40-foot putt. “All it lacks,” he said of Hazeltine, “is 80 acres of corn and a few cows to be a good farm.” And he finished second.
Jack Nicklaus, more diplomatic than Hill, said what bothered him about Hazeltine is Ben Hogan never played there, meaning if the USGA, which runs the Open, is so obsessed with tradition, why are they bringing it to a site with no link to Hogan, Sam Snead or other former greats?
Now, after a remodeling, two U.S. Opens, a PGA Championship and the 2016 Ryder Cup, Hazeltine has some history and a presence. Mark Twain said that politicians, old buildings and prostitutes become respectable with age. To that list, add golf courses.
So maybe there is hope for Erin Hills. Or maybe not. The USGA deserves a small cheer, at least, for expanding the Open, once limited to very old line, private, restricted — and admittedly great — courses such as Merion, The Country Club and Winged Foot.
But bringing in venues such as Pebble Beach, Pinehurst and Bethpage Black, all expensive but available to the public, is different than showing up at a little-known site among barns and silos in America's Dairyland.
To a golfer, names like Pebble, Oakmont, Medinah and Shinnecock Hills, at the end of Long Island, have a certain resonance. As throughout sports do names such as Churchill Downs, the Rose Bowl and Yankee Stadium. Staging the U.S. Open at Erin Hills is akin to holding Wimbledon on a battered tennis court in northeast England, even if the opponents are Federer and Nadal.
This is the second installment of the USGA’s “Guess what we’ve got cooking?” idea. Two years ago, the Open was played at Chambers Bay, another unproven course on Puget Sound near Tacoma. It fell victim to the weather, a lack of rain in frequently rainy Washington State.
Gary Player, who has his own agenda — he designs courses — said Chambers Bay was awful. At least there were some beautiful views, unlike Erin Hills. And at the end, after the grumbling, the one-two finishers were, in order, Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson, two of the best.
That always has been one way to judge the quality of any course, and whether it should be used either for the U.S. Open or the PGA Championship: the leaderboard. The other two majors, the Masters, always at Augusta National, and the British Open, are outside this category.
If you get Spieth, who won two majors in ’15, and Johnson, who took last year’s U.S. Open at venerable Oakmont, then maybe the course will gain acceptance over the years. If not, at least it may have produced one magnificent tournament.
This week at Erin Hills, the leaderboard through two rounds was decent, especially with no Tiger Woods — who may be out forever — or Phil Mickelson in the field.
Rickie Fowler, who has the commercials, might at last get the major. Players such as Brooks Koepka and Paul Casey are winners lingering just outside the big names. They wouldn’t be a surprise with a victory.
What Erin Hills could have used to escape anonymity was a win by Rory McIlroy, Jason Day or Dustin Johnson, each of whom has at one time of late — Johnson at the moment — been No. 1 in the world rankings. “Never heard of the place, but Rory won there” sort of attention.
But Rory and Day missed the cut, and Dustin was right on the line.
Maybe Erin Hills' reputation will be that of the course where Day made two triple bogies on the front nine in the first round and a 23-year-old Open rookie from San Diego, Xander Schauffele, didn’t make a bogey until the second round.
Whatever, it’s still smack in the middle of nowhere, a course as hard to find as it is to play.