The ladies take on the course that victimized Ben and Arnie

SAN FRANCISCO — So, it’s another U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, where Arnie and Ben became victims, not winners; where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge from the third tee — but because of the rough you often can’t see the ball after a shot — and where reverse camber fairways make the course almost as zany as the city where it’s located.

But it’s not another U.S. Open starting on Thursday at Olympic, wedged along the Pacific on San Francisco’s western edge. For the first time, it’s the Women’s Open, meaning the best female golfers will get to know the misery that Olympic can inflict.

No water hazards. Only one fairway bunker — on the sixth hole — but trees, cypress and pine by the hundreds, and rough by the foot. 

“Really thick and long,” said Inbee Park, a two-time champion. “You have to hit the fairways on this course. It’s an automatic bogey if you don’t.”

Opens — this is the 76th women’s — are infamous for difficulty. And griping. And, of the five men’s Opens at Olympic, for unexpected champions: in ’55 Jack Fleck, not the favored Ben Hogan; in ‘66 Billy Casper, not the favored Arnold Palmer; in ’87 Scott Simpson, not the favored Tom Watson.

What this means for the ladies we’ll find out soon enough. The oddsmakers — yes, there’s betting on everything, including women’s golf — made Park the favorite, followed closely by Jin Young Ko, Lydia Ko and Sei Young Kim.

Probably the best bet would be on Olympic’s Lake Course, built in the 1920s. literally on one end of the San Andreas Fault. The late Ken Venturi (who won the Open at Congressional) grew up in San Francisco. He said the property where Olympic is located was changing constantly. That wasn’t the cause of reverse camber, where, as at the par-4 fourth, you need to play left while your feet are aimed downhill right.   

Then there is the way the course is prepared, not the way the Women’s Open entrants would prefer. Add the typical June weather — Mark Twain never actually wrote that the coldest winner he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, but whoever did was accurate — and few are happy.

“I was terrified,” Angela Stanford, who has played in 21 U.S. Women’s Opens, said after her first shots in the opening practice round. Maybe she thought it was an Alfred Hitchcock setting, not a sporting venue.

There is, however, a legitimate fear in having to negotiate an Open course with small, hard greens and not much room to land a tee shot. Strokes can multiply all too quickly.

In only four of the five previous men’s Opens, just four players finished with under-par totals, winners Casper and Simpson, and runners-up Palmer and Watson. Stanford, after playing, said, “That makes sense.”

To John Bodnehamer, the U. S. Golf Association’s director of championships, so does a course that is testing. If the Open is the hardest tournament of the year, well, shouldn’t that be the case for a national championship?

“These players are good!” Bodnehamer told Tod Leonard of Golf Digest. “They’re going to find a way to hit those fairways, they’re going to make putts, and you’re going to see players under par. You’re just gonna!

“I’ll say that now. I don’t know what it will be. But they’re damn good, and we want to showcase that. And it is hard, and when they do excel, and they shoot under par on a hard place, I think it just showcases that side of what they do.”

It’s the other side that worries them. No athlete wants to look bad, and on a course as challenging as Olympic is under tough conditions, the possibility of looking bad is, well, quite good.